The Biblical Characters of Chaucer's Monk

PMLA ◽  
1951 ◽  
Vol 66 (5) ◽  
pp. 827-843
Author(s):  
Dudley R. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
French Version ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Narratives ◽  
Vulgate Bible

Of the seventeen tragedies which Chaucer's Monk bewails, seven (or eight, if Lucifer merits inclusion in the category) have as protagonists characters drawn from the Bible. It has generally been assumed that for the greater part of the Biblical information in The Monk's Tale Chaucer used the Vulgate, while he gleaned a few details from Boccaccio's De Casibus Virorum et Feminarum Illustrium, which served as model for the collection of tragedies. There are, however, in Chaucer's work various divergencies from, or augmentations of, the Biblical narratives which can be explained neither by the Vulgate nor by the Boccaccean collection. In an article entitled “Vincent of Beauvais and Chaucer's Monks Tale,” Miss Pauline Aiken has presented her theory that the influence of Vincent's Speculum Eistoriale may be detected in eight of the Monk's tragedies, but that “among the sources of this tale the first place is to be assigned to the Vulgate Bible.” I should like to propose another source for the Biblical portions of The Monk's Tale: a French version of the Scriptures, the Bible Eistoriale of Guyart Desmoulins.

Global Thefts of Biblical Narrative

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerald West
Keyword(s):  
Third World ◽  
Biblical Narrative ◽  
Biblical Story ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Narratives ◽  
African Experience ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Family Resemblances ◽  
African Perspective ◽  
The Subject

This chapter takes its starting point from the African experience, across a range of African contexts, of Africa as both the subject and object of biblical narrative. When the Bible came to Africa, it came with well-established colonial metanarratives, constructed in part from biblical narratives. These colonial metanarratives were in turn partly reconstructed by the engagement with African others, from both a European and an African perspective along two diverging trajectories, with biblical narrative making a contribution to both. This chapter focuses on the capacity of biblical narrative, biblical story, to be both incorporated into “local” metanarratives and to shape these metanarratives. The contexts that are the focus of this chapter are largely “third world” contexts, across which there are significant family resemblances and important contextual differences.

The Southern Levant and the Ancient Near Eastern Canon

2020 ◽  
pp. 45-65
Author(s):  
Rachel Hallote
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Southern Levant ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Narratives ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth

When the artistic canon of the Southern Levant coalesced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scholars thought of the region, then Ottoman Palestine, as the locus of the Bible. The small-scale nature of the archaeological finds as well as their relative dearth reinforced a reliance on biblical narratives as a framework for understanding the culture of the region. Moreover, early scholarship did not recognize the complex regionalism of the Southern Levant or the diversity of its populations. Consequently, the artistic canon that developed did not represent the historical and archaeological realities of the region. This chapter examines the history of how the artistic canon of the Southern Levant formed over the past century of scholarship, why various scholars of the early and middle twentieth century included particular items in the canon, and why these now entrenched representations may or may not be helpful to the discipline’s future.

Behind Auerbach's “Background”: Five Ways to Read What Biblical Narratives Don't Say

AJS Review ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-150
Author(s):  
James Adam Redfield
Keyword(s):  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Narrative Style ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Research And Teaching ◽  
Biblical Narratives ◽  
Contemporary Work

The Hebrew Bible's narrative style has impressed interpreters of many periods and perspectives with its powerful tension between fragmentary speech and meaningful silence, summed up in Erich Auerbach's famous thesis that the Akedah is “fraught with background.” But is it possible to give a coherent account of what the Bible does not say? This article offers a comparative critical analysis of attempts to do just that, starting with Auerbach's Mimesis (1946) and continuing through the contemporary work of James Kugel, Robert Alter, Meir Sternberg, Avivah Zornberg, and others. It claims that, rather than the text itself, the Bible's “background” serves as a metaphor by which the biblical critic navigates a complex relationship with her own normative construct of the reader's mind. This comparison concludes with practical considerations about its potential for research and teaching in biblical poetics, understood as rigorous intersubjective communication, rather than as either method or ideology.

The End of Days

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Harper
Keyword(s):  
West African ◽  
Black Religion ◽  
Religious Thought ◽  
Political Decision ◽  
New Jerusalem ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Narratives ◽  
Early Reconstruction ◽  
End Times ◽  
Made In

For 4 million slaves, emancipation was a liberation and resurrection story of biblical proportion, both the clearest example of God’s intervention in human history and a sign of the end of days. This book demonstrates how black southerners’ theology, in particular their understanding of the end times, influenced nearly every major economic and political decision they made in the aftermath of emancipation. From considering what demands to make in early Reconstruction to deciding whether or not to migrate west, African American Protestants consistently inserted themselves into biblical narratives as a way of seeing the importance of their own struggle in God’s greater plan for humanity. Phrases like “jubilee,” “Zion,” “valley of dry bones,” and the “New Jerusalem” in black-authored political documents invoked different stories from the Bible to argue for different political strategies. This study offers new ways of understanding the intersections between black political and religious thought of this era. Until now, scholarship on black religion has not highlighted how pervasive or contested these beliefs were. This narrative, however, tracks how these ideas governed particular political moments as African Americans sought to define and defend their freedom in the forty years following emancipation.

The Tsene-rene and Purim Plays

2014 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-67
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Veidlinger
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Narratives ◽  
Hebrew Scripture ◽  
Canonical Text ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Scholarly Attention

This article addresses some of the ways that Eastern European Jews in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries accessed the Bible. It argues that reading the Hebrew Scripture itself was just one of many ways that common Jews became acquainted with biblical stories, and suggests that historians place greater scholarly attention on the extra-canonical sources Jews commonly used to access biblical narratives. Jewish audiences also heard biblical stories through interpretations, popular retellings, and dramatic performances. The article discusses the most popular Yiddish interpretive retelling, the sixteenth-century Tsene-rene, and demonstrates how some of its variances from the canonical text may have influenced Jewish notions of time and redemption. The article concludes with a discussion of some Purimshpils (plays performed during the holiday of Purim) and how they reinforced the ideas of the Tsene-rene.

scholarly journals The Ordinary Gloss on Jonah

PMLA ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 128 (2) ◽  
pp. 424-438
Author(s):  
Ryan McDermott
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Thomas Aquinas ◽  
Divine Comedy ◽  
Religious Literature ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Narratives ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
John Wyclif

THE ORDINARY GLOSS WAS THE MOST WIDELY USED EDITION OF THE BIBLE IN THE LATER MIDDLE AGES AND WELL INTO THE SIXTEENTH century. Medievalists know the commentary element as the Gloss to which theologians as diverse as Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, John Wyclif, and Martin Luther habitually referred. As the foremost vehicle for medieval exegesis, the Gloss framed biblical narratives for a wide range of vernacular religious literature, from Dante's Divine Comedy to French drama to a Middle English retelling of the Jonah story, Patience.

scholarly journals PUBLIC RITUALS: GRASPING MYTH IN DAVID GROSSMAN’S TO THE END OF THE LAND

2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-250
Author(s):  
Yael Almog
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Israeli Society ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Word Play ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Narratives ◽  
Modern Hebrew

The article investigates David Grossman’s To the End of the Land as an intervention into debates on the presence of myth in Israeli society. Do resonances of the Bible in Modern Hebrew perpetuate biblical narratives as constitutive to Israeli collective memory? Do literary references to the Bible dictate the rootedness of Hebrew speakers to the Land? Grossman’s novel discerns the implications of these questions for the political agency of individuals. It does so through the striking adaptation of a motif much frequented in Israeli literature: the Binding of Isaac. The prominent biblical myth is transformed in the novel through a set of interplays: the unusual enactment of the Akedah scene by a matriarch; original exegeses of biblical names; and the merging of several biblical narratives into the novel’s structure. The protagonists reveal their “awareness” of these interplays, when they reflect on the correspondence of their “lives” with various biblical narratives – whose divergence from one another enable them to negotiate the overdetermination of myth in political discourse. The article argues that the novel’s reflective stance on the role of myth in Israeli society is codependent on the philosophy of language that it develops. To the End of the Land features language acquisition, linguistic interferences with Israel’s main vernacular by other languages, word play and semiotic collapse. Through the presentation of linguistic utterances as contingent, associative, subjective and ever-changing, the identification with biblical narratives is rendered volatile. To the End of the Land questions the limits of Israeli literature in redefining the valence of the language in which it is written as well as the ability of literary texts to reshape major conditions for their own reception: collective memory and national motifs.

Biblical Questioning

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James A. Diamond
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Human History ◽  
Highest Good ◽  
Garden Of Eden ◽  
Book Of Job ◽  
Independent Investigation ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Narratives

Questions posed by God and biblical characters in the Hebrew Bible are often philosophically empowering moments. They transpire from the very inception of human history, according to the Bible’s own reconstructed version of it. Rather than divinely imposed law, biblical questioning is a vital tool initiating the decisive biblical way toward truth through independent investigation. Questions then recur throughout various biblical narratives, revealing the Bible’s philosophical dimension. As such, they may indicate the Bible’s conception of the essential expression of humanity, or where the Bible locates the beginning of serious thought, and how it suggests proceeding in the search for truth and the highest good. This chapter explores specific episodes where questions are posed, beginning with the Garden of Eden and ending with the book of Job.

Genesis 1-11 in the Qatsi Film Trilogy

2020 ◽  
pp. 291-308
Author(s):  
Gregory Allen Robbins
Keyword(s):  
Film Studies ◽  
Audience Reception ◽  
Third Wave ◽  
Cultural Interpretation ◽  
Tower Of Babel ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Narratives ◽  
Genesis 1 ◽  
History Of ◽  
Original Story

This chapter explores the ways cinema appropriates biblical motifs and transforms them, and how those motifs might be received and experienced by viewers. Insofar as it engages more fully film criticism and theory and inquires about audience reception, it reflects the so-called third wave of religion and film studies. While films have taken their inspiration from biblical narratives and characters since the medium’s invention, this contribution, following Adele Reinhartz’s lead, directs our attention to films whose biblical elements may be apparent only to those familiar with the Bible and its cultural interpretation. It focuses on Godfrey Reggio’s critically acclaimed Qatsi trilogy (Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi, and Naqoyqatsi), which represent cinematic transformations of the primeval history of Genesis 1–11. The ordering of the Cosmos, God’s declaration of its goodness, the command to the first humans to conquer and hold sway over it, human disobedience, the devolution of the created order into increasing violence, and the transgression of boundaries, including the building of the tower of Babel, are all echoed in these films. The films are transformations in the sense that they do not merely allude to the Genesis story or touch upon it in passing; they stay with the passages to which they allude, drawing out the implications of the text, wrestling with interpretive possibilities, offering visual metamorphoses that tantalize the modern imagination. While the character of the original story remains recognizably familiar, the cinematic vesture provides for dazzling transfigurations.

ELE NOS DEU HISTÓRIAS: EXEMPLOS DE INTERTEXTUALIDADE ENTRE A NARRATIVA BÍBLICA E A OBRA DE MACHADO DE ASSIS "He gave us stories: examples of intertextuality between the biblical narrative and the work of Machado de Assis"

2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (10) ◽  
pp. 267
Author(s):  
Alexandre De Jesus dos Prazeres
Keyword(s):  
Machado De Assis ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
Biblical Narrative ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Narratives

O foco deste texto é despertar o interesse pelo estudo da Bíblia, não somente devido ao seu valor como texto de religião, mas principalmente pelo seu valor literário. E, para isto, o artigo demonstrará, de modo breve, algumas características da narrativa bíblica; e por meio do conceito linguístico de intertextualidade, apresentará alguns exemplos da influência das narrativas bíblicas em textos do escritor brasileiro, Machado de Assis.Palavras-chave: Bíblia. Literatura. Interface. Hermenêutica.AbstractThe focus of this text is to awaken interest in the study of the Bible, not only because of its value as text religion, but mainly for their literary value. And for this, the article will demonstrate, briefly, some features of the biblical narrative, and through the linguistic concept of intertextuality. It will show some examples of the influence of the biblical narratives in the texts of the Brazilian writer Machado de Assis.Keywords: Bible. Literature. Interface. Hermeneutics.

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