Renaissance Studies Commons^™

Front Matter

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Deception And Distance In Béroul's Tristan: A Reconsideration, Norris J. Lacy

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Some years ago, I suggested that the irony and the pervasive equivocations that characterize the text of Béroul's Tristan have the effect of precluding, on the narrator's part, an implicit ethical endorsement of the characters. Although that is still my view, I went on, perhaps too incautiously, to question Béroul's narrative reliability. Considering the importance of such matters for our understanding of Béroul's art, it is not inappropriate to reconsider this problem. In fact, I think it reasonable now to begin with the assertion that, although his work is full of ambiguities, ironies, and tricks, Béroul's narrator never deceives his …

The Fiction Of The "Livre" In Robert De Boron's Merlin, Stephen Maddux

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Robert de Baron, thought to have been responsible for changing Chrétien's graal into a Christian relic and his tale of Perceval into a cycle, was also an innovator when it came to the convention of the bookish source for his story. Marie de France and Chrétien both were careful to supply their poems with some kind of external authority, which was often book-like, if not in fact always a written text. Chrétien twice refers to actual books; Marie de France's sources were presumably all oral, but she treats them as though they were written, that is, deserving the same treatment …

Gawain's "Anti-Feminism" Reconsidered, S. L. Clark, Julian N. Wasserman

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In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the protagonist survives the return blow for which he had contracted with the Green Knight but finds to his dismay that he has unwittingly failed a more significant test. As the awareness comes to Gawain that the Green Knight and his Yuletide host share one identity, that it was upon Bercilak's instructions that his wife attempted to seduce him, and that Morgan la Fée had, in effect, master-minded the whole plan, Gawain reacts with bursts of anger which, wen analyzed, speak not only to the Pearl-Poet's skill at characterization but also …

Adam's Dream: Fortune And The Tragedy Of The Chester 'Drapers Playe', George Ovitt Jr.

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In glossing a passage from his translation of Boethius's De consolatione philosophiae, Chaucer provides a definition of tragedy which would have been familiar to any fourteenth-century reader and which, perhaps, still seems adequate to the twentieth-century reader: "What other thyng bywaylen the cryinges of tragedyes but oonly the dedes of Fortune, that this unwar strook overturneth the realmes of greet nobleye? (Glose. Tragedye is to seyn a dite of a prosperite for a tyme, that endeth in wrecchidnesse.)" The substance of this gloss is repeated in the 'Prologue' to the "Monk's Tale": "Tragedie is to seyn a certeyn storie, …

Belief, Justification, And Knowledge – Some Late-Medieval Epistemic Concerns, Ivan Boh

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It has become a commonplace in contemporary analytic philosophy to offer a contextual definition of knowledge in terms of the following statement of necessary and sufficient conditions:

a knows that p if and only if

(i) a believes that p

(ii) p is the case

(iii) a is justified in believing that p

An enormous amount of literature on various aspects of this statement has been produced and the discussion continues.

Latin And Vernacular In Fourteenth- And Fifteenth-Century Italy, Paul Oskar Kristeller

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The subject of this essay concerns Dante only indirectly and in part. Nevertheless I hope to be able, among other things, to explain Dante's historical position and his influence on the Italian Renaissance. I cannot avoid partially repeating what I wrote in some of my previous studies, especially in my early article on the Italian prose language. Some of my prior observations, which seemed new to me at the time, have since been widely accepted; but some new sources and literature have been added in the meantime, and on some points I have changed my opinion or paid attention to …

Rites And Passage In Leonardo Bruni's Dialogues To Pier Paolo Vergerio, Olga Zorzi Pugliese

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The Dialogues to Pier Paolo Vergerio are a fairly brief, rather unassuming, yet much defamed work by Leonardo Bruni (c. 1370-1444), the Italian humanist from Arezzo who lived most of his life in Florence, the hub of early Renaissance civilization. Composed of two parts, the second of which is, apparently, a retraction of the first, and dating probably from a the years 1401 and 1405-06, respectively, the Dialogues constitute, because of the contradictions contained in them, a puzzling text that has elicited a variety of interpretations from critics in the historical as well as the literary fields. Although much research …

Great Black Goats And Evil Little Women: The Image Of The Witch In Sixteenth-Century German Aart, Jane P. Davidson

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Witch imagery in German Renaissance art may strike the modern observer as something incongruous in an age noted for interest in humanism, reformation, science, appreciation of beauty and the like. Nonetheless, it existed. Further, we find a number of prominent German artists who depicted witches. The operative point here is probably an interest in realism. Renaissance artists, north and south, were preoccupied with reality. Too this end, their art stressed optical accuracy, factual anatomy, convincing natural details and so on.

Correspondence With Women: The Case Of John Knox, A. Daniel Frankforter

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The Reformation opened an ambiguous era for women. There were risks of losses and opportunities for gain for women who made the transition to Protestant faith. Protestant women gave up some traditional religious supports. The Virgin Mary and the female saints, who provided Catholic women with role models and sisterly patronage, were thrust aside. Priestly intercession ended, the Protestant women, like men, stood alone with their consciences in the presence of God. Women were denied the option of careers as nuns in self-governing female communities, and virginity ceased to be a respected female vocation. All women were expected to marry, …

Chaucer And The Three Crowns Of Florence (Dante, Petrarch, And Boccaccio): Recent Comparative Scholarship, Madison U. Sowell

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Chaucer and the Italian Trecento. Ed. Piero Boitani. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. 313 p. $49.50.

Howard H. Schless, Chaucer and Dante: A Revaluation. Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1984. 268 p. $85.00.

R. A. Shoaf, Dante, Chaucer, and the Currency of the World: Money, Images, and Reference in Late Medieval Poetry. Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1983. 313 p. $39.95.

Full Issue

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No abstract provided.

King Alfred And The Latin Manuscripts Of Gregory's Regula Pastoralis, Richard W. Clement

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King Alfred's translation of Pope Gregory the Great's Liber Regulae Pastoralis has long been recognized by students of Anglo-Saxon literature as one of the earliest and greatest monuments of Old English prose. Alfred's first translation, commonly referred to as the Pastoral Care, has been the focus of much scholarly attention by historians, philologists, and literary critics. Historians have seized upon the work more for Alfred's two prefaces and what they tell us in Ninth-century England than for the translation itself, but nonetheless the mode of translation is not without its biographical and historical implications. Philologists on the other hand …

Can We Speak Of An Islamic Middle Ages? A Conceptual Problem Examined Through Literature, Julie Scott Meisami

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In his introduction to The Arabs and Medieval Europe Norman Daniel, after rejecting the "traditional" Gibbonian definition of the Middle Ages as "the age between a fixed classical civilization and the modern world which inherits it" in favor of a view which affirms the unbroken continuity of European history, concludes that "for all non-European peoples ... the concept of a Middle Age has no relevance, at least for their internal history. Any relevance it has must be in relation to Europe" (3). Similarly, in the area oof literature, Robert Rehder in a review article states categorically that "Medieval is …