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Obscurity In Medieval Texts, Lucie Doležalová, Jeff Rider, Alessandro Zironi

Jeff Rider

Modern readers of medieval texts often find them obscure. Some of this obscurity is accidental and inevitable due to the historical and cultural distance that separates modern readers from medieval authors, but medieval readers and authors also appear to have simply had a higher tolerance for textual obscurity than we do and even to have viewed obscurity as desirable and a virtue. They did not believe that obscurity could ever be eradicated and were not scared of the indescribable, indivisible, and ungraspable; they accepted reality as complex and ultimately unintelligible. Obscurity was not simply a riddle to be solved. It …