What nature does not teach : didactic literature in the medieval and early-modern periods / edited by Juanita Feros Ruys.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Ruys, Juanita Feros.

Constance L. Rosenthal Book Fund.

Series:

Disputatio (Turnhout, Belgium) ; v. 15.

Disputatio ; 15

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Didactic literature--History and criticism--Congresses.

Didactic literature.

Literature, Medieval--History and criticism--Congresses.

Literature, Medieval.

European literature--Renaissance, 1450-1600--Congresses.

European literature.

European literature--Renaissance.

Genre:

Conference papers and proceedings.

Physical Description:

xii, 527 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm.

Place of Publication:

Turnhout : Brepols ; Abingdon : Marston [distributor], [2008]

Summary:

Disputatio

The book series Disputatio publishes interdisciplinary scholarship on the intellectual culture and intellectual history of the European Middle Ages. The medieval focus is construed broadly to encompass a chronology ranging from the end of the classical Roman age to the rise of the modern world. Disputatio seeks to promote scholarly dialogue among the various disciplines that study medieval texts and ideas and their diffusion and reception.

What Nature Does Not Teach

Didactic Literature in the Medieval and Early-Modern Periods

This interdisciplinary study takes as its subject the multi-faceted genre of didactic literature (the literature of instruction) which constituted the cornerstone of literary enterprise and social control in medieval and early-modern Europe. Following an introduction that raises questions of didactic meaning, intent, audience, and social effect, nineteen chapters deal with the construction of the individual didactic voice and persona in the premodern period, didactic literature for children, women as the creators, objects, and consumers of didactic literature, the influence of advice literature on adult literacy, piety, and heresy, and the revision of classical didactic forms and motifs in the early-modern period. Attention is paid throughout to the continuities of didactic literature across the medieval and early-modern periods - its intertextuality, reliance on tradition, and self-renewal - and to questions of gender, authority, control, and the socially constructed nature of advice. Contributors particularly explore the intersection of advice literature with real lives, considering the social impact of both individual texts and the didactic genre as a whole. The volume deals with a wide variety of texts from the early Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, written in languages from Latin through the European vernaculars to Byzantine Greek and Russian, offering a comprehensive overview of this pervasive and influential genre.

Contents:

Approaches to didactic literature, meaning, intent, audience, social effect / Juanita Feros Ruys

The pseudo-Aristotelian Secret of secrets as a didactic text / Steven J. Williams

Preaching and teaching : the Codex rustici as confused pilgrimage tale / Kathleen Olive

Nee en Ytale : Christine de Pizan's migrant didactic voice / Louise D'Arcens

Vladimir Monomakh's Instruction : an old Russian pedagogic treatise / Maria Nenarokova

Didactic Is and the voice of experience in advice from medieval and early-modern parents to their children / Juanita Feros Ruys

The world must be peopled : children and their context in Renaissance Florence / Catherine England

Women teachers in early Byzantine hagiography / Stavroula Constantinou

Thomasin von Zerclaere's Der welsche Gast and Hugo von Trimberg's Der Renner : two middle high German didactic writers focus on gender relations / Albrecht Classen

Guidance for men who minister to women in The Liber de reformation monasterorium of Johannes Busch / Julie Hotchin

Elizabethan drama and The instruction of a Chrisitian woman by Juan Luis Vives / Ursula Potter

English translations of didactic literature for women to 1550 / Alexandra Barratt

Lawrence of Amalfi and the boundary between the oral and the written in eleventh-century Europe / John O. Ward

Master Vacarius, Speroni, and heresy : law and theology as didactic literature in the twelfth century / Jason Taliadoros

For lewed men y vndyr toke on englyssh tonge to make this boke : Handlying Synne and English didactic writing for the laity / Anne M. Scott

Anglo-Latin collection of the Gesta romanorum and their role in the cure of souls / Philippa Bright

Dulces discet ab arte sonos : the Latin didactic poem on music of Philomathes (Vienna, 1512) / Frances Muecke and Robert Forgács

Vindicating Vulcan : Renaissance manuals of mining and metallurgy / Anthony Miller

Astronomy and philopsphical orientation in classical and Renaissance didactic poetry / Emma Gee

Sleeping with the enemy : Tommaso Ceva's use and abuse of Lucretius in the Philosophia novo-antiqua (Milan, 1704) / Yasmin Haskell.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Constance L. Rosenthal Book Fund.

ISBN:

2503525962

9782503525969

OCLC:

198758691

Publisher Number:

99946495119