scholarly journals El fénix, el basilisco y el dragón: trascendencia de la animalia fabulosa y su simbolismo en los libros de emblemas

2022 ◽  
pp. 44-80
Author(s):  
Penélope Marcela Fernández Izaguirre
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Previous Knowledge ◽  
Emblem Books ◽  
Literary Sources ◽  
The Phoenix ◽  
The Middle Ages

RESUMEN: Entre los materiales que los Libros de Emblemas utilizaron para llevar a cabo el propósito de instruir a sus receptores, están los discursos sobre animales fabulosos que los autores recopilaron y adaptaron de diversas fuentes literarias pertenecientes a la Antigüedad clásica y a la Edad Media. Por esta razón la emblemática también es el producto de la asimilación del conocimiento anterior que se tiene sobre animales reales o no. En este tenor, el objetivo de este artículo es comprobar, a través de ejemplos que provienen de la animalia fabulosa, que las representaciones emblemáticas de estos libros asimilan la información proveniente de los antiguos doctos para otorgarles renovada continuidad en cuanto a la función y simbología de las descripciones zoológicas. Para lo anterior, recurriré al análisis del ave fénix, el basilisco y el dragón en el contexto antes mencionado. ABSTRACT: Among the materials that the Emblem Books used to carry out the purpose of instructing their recipients are the discourses on fabulous animals that the authors compiled and adapted from various literary sources belonging to classical antiquity and the Middle Ages. For this reason, emblematic is also the product of the assimilation of previous knowledge about real or not real animals. In this sense, the aim of this article is to prove that the emblematic representations of these books assimilate the information coming from the ancient scholars to give them renewed continuity in terms of the function and symbolism of zoological descriptions. For the above, I will resort to the analysis of the phoenix, the basilisk and the dragon in the aforementioned context.

The Meaning of ‘carruca’ in the ‘Leges Barbarorum’

Traditio ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 297-300
Author(s):  
Theodore John Rivers
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Transitional Period ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Medieval Latin ◽  
Original Meaning ◽  
Literary Sources ◽  
The Middle Ages

The term carruca (or carruga), like many other terms in medieval Latin, acquired a new and different meaning in the Middle Ages in place of its original classical meaning. There is no confusion over the meaning of carruca in Roman historical and literary sources: it clearly means a four-wheeled wagon or carriage. However, its original meaning was modified during the medieval period so that by the early ninth century carruca denoted a wheeled plow. Although the medieval plow is often called a carruca (whereas the Roman plow is called an aratrum), one should not infer that all references to carruca in medieval sources signify a plow, particularly if these sources are datable to that transitional period during which the classical meaning of the word was beginning to be transformed into its medieval one. Characteristic of the sources which fall within this period are the Germanic tribal laws (leges barbarorum), and of these, three individual laws in particular are of interest: the Pactus legis Salicae 38.1, Lex Ribuaria 47.2, and Lex Alamannorum 93.2.

Mandelstam: The Realm of Unexpectedness

2021 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 62-83
Author(s):  
Svetlana S. Neretina
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Logical Framework ◽  
Creation Process ◽  
The Real ◽  
Logical Construction ◽  
The World ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Middle Ages

In the essay “Conversation about Dante,” Mandelstam described logic, which he defined as the “realm of unexpectedness,” which is unlike any everyday logical construction. Based on the analysis of Mandelstam’s text, it is assumed that we are talking about a tropology that arose in the Middle Ages, the principles of which can be derived from studies of St. Augustine’s treatise De Dialectica and Petrus Сomestor’s Historia Scholastica. It is this triple commonwealth (Augustine – Comestor – Dante, read by Mandelstam) that creates the multilayered logical framework of the work. Augustine created a completely different dialectic than in classical antiquity. Augustine considers dialectics as an art of discussion and describes the real steps that contribute to the emergence of speech, which corresponds to Mandelstam’s concept of conversation. According to Augustine, at the basis of any speech, is a trope-turn. In the article, attention is drawn to the sound nature of creation process. This logic, used in explaining the creation of the world according to the logos/word (tropology), assumes that, at the basis of the speech act, there is no the word as a unit of speech, but the sound itself – the sound, which was considered initially equivocal (ambiguous). In the process of pronounciation, the sound could turn into its opposite and could change the meaning of speech if the context has been changed. Dante expressed the meaning of tropology in practice. Mandelstam wrote that he had chosen Dante for the conversation (between poet and poet) “because he is the greatest and indisputable master of reversible and reversing poetic substance.” Mandelstam saw Dante as the Descartes of metaphor.

The Traditional Background of Partonopeus de Blois

PMLA ◽  
1946 ◽  
Vol 61 (4-Part1) ◽  
pp. 916-946
Author(s):  
Helaine Newstead
Keyword(s):  
French Text ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Critical Edition ◽  
Comprehensive Analysis ◽  
Folk Tale ◽  
Specific Study ◽  
French Edition ◽  
Literary Sources ◽  
Cupid And Psyche ◽  
The Middle Ages

The romance of Partonopeus de Blois, though widely read and much admired in the Middle Ages, has not aroused a comparable interest among modern scholars. No edition of the French text has been published since 1834, and no exhaustive investigation of its literary sources has yet appeared. The story is usually explained as a medievalized version of the legend of Cupid and Psyche, with the roles of hero and heroine reversed under the influence of Breton lais of the fairy mistress type. Since critical discussions have tended to emphasize—perhaps overemphasize—the indebtedness of Partonopeus to the classical legend and its folk tale analogues, the connections with the Breton lais and the matière de Bretagne have been explored only in a general and rather tentative way. A more specific study of these connections based on the available French edition may help us to reach a clearer understanding of the materials which compose this charming romance, although a comprehensive analysis must await a critical edition of the text.

On the Latin Sources of Thèbes and Énéas

PMLA ◽  
1901 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 375-387
Author(s):  
F. M. Warren
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Romantic Love ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
The Middle Ages

The French poems Troie, Thèbes, and Énéas, contemporaneous with one another in the sixth and seventh decades of the twelfth century, have many characteristics in common. They each repeat in a modernized form, and with incidents and details suited to their own age, the story of one of the great epics of classical antiquity, the Iliad, the Thebaid, and the Aeneid. They also combine with this traditional outline of adventure and conquest the narrative of romantic love and courtship, as conceived by Western Europe in the Middle Ages. And finally they each and all show an effort to attain some degree of excellence in style and composition. Thus they form a class by themselves, animated, as they are, by the same spirit and having the same purpose in view, and are the first exponents in the modern tongues of the ideals of chivalry. The sources of these poems, therefore, are an object of unusual interest to the student of mediaeval literature.

scholarly journals Suspending Disbelief: Magnetic and Miraculous Levitation from Antiquity to the Middle Ages

2016 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 247-278
Author(s):  
Dunstan Lowe
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Magnetic Suspension ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Pliny The Elder ◽  
Varied History ◽  
The Middle Ages

Static levitation is a form of marvel with metaphysical implications whose long history has not previously been charted. First, Pliny the Elder reports an architect’s plan to suspend an iron statue using magnetism, and the later compiler Ampelius mentions a similar-sounding wonder in Syria. When the Serapeum at Alexandria was destroyed, and for many centuries afterwards, chroniclers wrote that an iron Helios had hung magnetically inside. In the Middle Ages, reports of such false miracles multiplied, appearing in Muslim accounts of Christian and Hindu idolatry, as well as Christian descriptions of the tomb of Muhammad. A Christian levitation miracle involving saints’ relics also emerged. Yet magnetic suspension could be represented as miraculous in itself, representing lost higher knowledge, as in the latest and easternmost tradition concerning Konark’s ruined temple. The levitating monument, first found in classical antiquity, has undergone many cultural and epistemological changes in its long and varied history.

The Idea of the Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages

1992 ◽  
Vol 87 (4) ◽  
pp. 917
Author(s):  
Peter Armour ◽  
Penelope Reed Doob
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
The Middle Ages

Italian Fables in Verse

PMLA ◽  
1906 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 226-278
Author(s):  
Kenneth McKenzie
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Folk Tales ◽  
The People ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
Four Books ◽  
The Middle Ages

Before the revival of Greek learning in the fifteenth century, the Æsopic fables of classical antiquity were known in Europe through Latin collections derived from Phædrus. Two of these collections were particularly well known; one which goes under the name of Romulus, written in prose in the tenth century; and a metrical version of the larger part of Romulus, written in the twelfth century. This metrical collection, called in the Middle Ages Esopus, is now ascribed to Walter of England, but is often called Anonymus Neveleti. Another metrical version of Romulus was made a little later by Alexander Neckam, and the fables of Avianus, also, were known to some extent. These collections, with numerous recensions and derivatives in Latin, and translations into many different languages, form a body of written fable-literature whose development can for the most part be clearly traced. At the same time, beast-fables were extensively employed in school and pulpit, and were continually repeated for entertainment as well as for instruction. Thus there was current all over Europe a great mass of fable-literature in oral tradition. The oral versions came in part from the written fable-books; others originated as folk-tales in medieval Europe; others had descended orally from ancient Greece, or had been brought from the Orient. Many are still current among the people in all parts of Europe, and beyond. From this mass of traditional material, heterogeneous collections of popular stories, including beast-fables, were reduced to writing in Latin and in other languages. An example of this process is found in the Esope of Marie de France, the earliest known fable-book in a modern vernacular, which was translated into French in the twelfth century from an English work which is now lost. Forty of Marie's fables, less than two-fifths of the whole number, came from a recension of the original Romulus called Romulus Nilantii; the others from popular stories of various kinds. Similarly, the important Æsop of Heinrich Steinhöwel contains the Romulus fables in four books, followed by seventeen fables called Extravagantes, others from the recently published Latin version of the Greek fables, from Avianus, from the Disciplina Clericalis of Petrus Alphonsus, and from Poggio,—in all, nine books, printed in Latin with a German translation about 1480, and speedily translated into many languages (including English, by Caxton in 1484, from the French version). The Extravagantes, like other collections, and like the episodes of the beast-epic (little known in Italy), came from popular tradition. Many writers show by incidental references that they were familiar with fables, although they may not have regarded them as worthy of serious attention,—writers like Dante, and his commentator Benvenuto da Imola. Moreover, the animal-lore of the bestiaries and of works like the Fiore di Virtù is closely akin to that of the fables. It is evident, then, that the collections descended from Phædrus, important though they were, represented but a fraction of the fable-literature that was current in the Middle Ages.

The Idea of the Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages

1991 ◽  
Vol 84 (6) ◽  
pp. 503
Author(s):  
Sally Rackley ◽  
Penelope Reed Doob
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
The Middle Ages
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