Magister Amoris: The Roman de la Rose and Vernacular Hermeneutics

Magister Amoris: The Roman de la Rose and Vernacular Hermeneutics
Author: Alastair J. Minnis
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2001-04-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0191580627

The Roman de la Rose was a major bestseller - largely due to its robust treatment of 'natural' sexuality. This study concentrates on the ways in which Jean de Meun, in imitation of Ovid, assumed the mock-magisterium (or mastership) of love. From Latin texts and literary theory Jean derived many hermeneutic rationales and generic categorizations, without allowing any one to dominate. Alastair J. Minnis considers allegorical versus literalistic expression in the poem, its competing discourses of allegorical covering and satiric stripping, Jean's provocative use of plain and sometimes obscene language in a widely accessible French work, the challenge of its homosocial and perhaps even homoerotic constructions, the subversive effects of coital comedy within a text characterized by intermittent aspirations to moral and scientific truth, and - placing the Rose's reception within the European history of vernacular hermeneutics - the problematic translation of literary authority from Latin into the vulgar tongue.

The Art of Love

The Art of Love
Author: Roy Gibson
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2007-01-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0191515442

The Art of Love celebrates the bi-millennium of Ovid's cycle of sophisticated and subversive didactic poems on love, traditionally assumed to have been brought to completion around AD 2. Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love) and Remedia Amoris (Cures for Love), which purport to teach young Roman men and women how to be good lovers, were partly responsible for the poet's exile from Rome under the emperor Augustus. None the less they exerted great influence over ancient and later love poetry. This is the first collection in English devoted to the poems, and brings together many of the leading figures in the field of Latin literature and Ovidian studies from the British Isles, Germany, Italy, and the United States. It offers a range of perspectives on the poetics, politics, and erotics of the poems, beginning with a critical survey of recent research, and concluding with papers on the ancient, medieval, and modern reception of the poems.

Serious Play

Serious Play
Author: Robert W. Hanning
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2010
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0231152108

In this thoughtful, scholarly, often humorous analysis of literary works--including Ovid's amatory poetry, excerpts from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and Ariosto's Orlando Furioso--Hanning (emer., Columbia Univ.) presents a raucous account of misdirected desire and mismanaged political authority. The author describes his readings as "appreciations" that interrogate "how these privileged individuals, writing basically for elite audiences, make comedy out of two very dangerous topics, desire and authority." The success of these celebrated writers stems from their ability to negotiate the "tensions between private and public imperatives." Hanning argues that his book is not a "scholarly work" and that his target audience is not academics. To the extent that the book is genuinely funny he succeeds, at least hypothetically, but the overall analysis is sophisticated, critically informed, and occasionally tendentious and political. His pose as elucidator and commentator is both an attraction--the tone and tenor of the book are inviting and approachable--and a distracting comic ruse in and of itself, as if a mock-serious disavowal of the academic mode could disguise the very serious re-visioning of cultures (ancient, modern, and contemporary) that takes place here. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. Graduate Students; Researchers/Faculty. Reviewed by D. Pesta.

Tibullus

Tibullus
Author: Michael C. J. Putnam
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 228
Release: 1973
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 9780806115603

The work of the Latin elegiac poet Tibullus (c. 55-19 b.c.) is characterized by an artful, witty "simplicity," and it relies on repetition, ambiguity, irony, and paradox for its effect. His poetry appealed to his countrymen in his own time, as it still does to students today, and this textbook is designed to explain and enhance that appeal. The commentary presented here is limited to the sixteen poems which comprise the first two books of the corpus Tibullianum, that is, to poems authentically by Tibullus. The notes focus on the needs of students approaching Latin elegy for the first time, but they will also prove useful to the more experienced student of Latin or to scholars in other languages. The editor has tried to balance matters of fact with occasional fresh interpretations. One introduction records what is known of the poet's life and discusses the rise of Latin elegy. The meter of the poems is explained, and Tibullus' style is examined.

The Master and Minerva

The Master and Minerva
Author: Helen Solterer
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2023-09-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0520915291

Can words do damage? For medieval culture, the answer was unambiguously yes. And as Helen Solterer contends, in French medieval culture the representation of women exemplified the use of injurious language. Solterer investigates the debates over women between masters and their disciples. Across a broad range of Old French literature to the early modern Querelle des femmes, she shows how the figure of the female respondent became an instrument for disputing the dominant models of representing women. The female respondent exploited the criterion of injurious language that so preoccupied medieval masters, and she charged master poets ethically and legally with libel. Solterer's work thus illuminates an early, decisive chapter in the history of defamation.

Violent Passions

Violent Passions
Author: T. Adams
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2005-09-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1403980888

This book re-evaluates the perception of "courtly love" in Old French verse. Adams traces how these verses explore the emotional trials of amour and propose coping methods for the lovelorn.

Magister Amoris

Magister Amoris
Author: Alastair J. Minnis
Publisher:
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2001
Genre: Love in literature
ISBN: 9780191718977

The 13th century poem, The Roman de la Rose was a bestseller largely due to its robust treatment of natural sexuality. This study concentrates on the ways in which Jean de Meung, in imitation of Ovid, assumed the mock-mastership of love.

Ovid's Heroidos

Ovid's Heroidos
Author: Howard Jacobson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 453
Release: 2015-03-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1400872391

A series of letters purportedly written by Penelope, Dido, Medea, and other heroines to their lovers, the Heroides represents Ovid's initial attempt to revitalize myth as a subject for literature. In this book, Howard Jacobson examines the first fifteen elegaic letters of the Heroides. In his critical evaluation, Professor Jacobson takes into consideration the twofold nature of the work: its existence as a single entity with uniform poetic structure and coherent goals, and its existence as a collection of fifteen individual poems. Thus, fifteen chapters are devoted to a thorough analysis and interpretation of the particular poems, while six additional chapters are concerned with problems that pertain to the work as a whole, such as the nature of the genre, the role of rhetoric, theme, and variation, and the originality of Ovid. Special attention is given to the application of modern psychological criticism to the delineations of the pathological psyche in the letters. In an additional chapter on the chronology of Ovid's early amatory poetry, the author challenges and revises the traditional dating of the Heroides. Originally published in 1974. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Ovid in French

Ovid in French
Author:
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2023-08-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0192895389

This collection of essays examines the ways Ovid's diverse oeuvre has been translated, rewritten, adapted, and responded to by a range of French and Francophone women from the Renaissance to the present. It aims to reveal lesser-known voices in Ovidian reception studies, and to offer a wider historical perspective on the complex question of Ovid and gender. Ranging from Renaissance poetry to contemporary creative-criticism, it charts an understudied strand of reception studies, emphasizing how a longer view allows us to explore and challenge the notion of a female tradition of Ovidian reception. The range of genres analysed here--poetry, verse and prose translation, theatre, epistolary fiction, autofiction, autobiography, film, creative critique, and novels--also reflect the diversity of the Ovidian texts in reception from the Heroides to the Metamorphoses, from the Amores to the Ars Amatoria, from the Tristia to the Fasti. The study brings an array of critical approaches to bear on well-known authors such as George Sand, Julia Kristeva, and Marguerite Yourcenar, as well as less-known figures, from contemporary writer Linda LĂȘ to the early modern Catherine and Madeline Des Roches, exploring exile, identity, queerness, displacement, voice, expectations of modesty, the poetics of translation, and the problems posed by Ovid's erotized violence, to name just some of the volume's rich themes. The epilogue by translator and novelist Marie Cosnay points towards new eco-critical and creative directions in Ovidian scholarship and reception. Students and scholars of French Studies, Classics, Comparative Literature and Translation Studies will find much to interest them in this diverse collection of essays.

Marlowe's Ovid

Marlowe's Ovid
Author: M. L. Stapleton
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2016-05-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317100336

The first book of its kind, Marlowe's Ovid explores and analyzes in depth the relationship between the Elegies-Marlowe's translation of Ovid's Amores-and Marlowe's own dramatic and poetic works. Stapleton carefully considers Marlowe's Elegies in the context of his seven known dramatic works and his epyllion, Hero and Leander, and offers a different way to read Marlowe. Stapleton employs Marlowe's rendition of the Amores as a way to read his seven dramatic productions and his narrative poetry while engaging with previous scholarship devoted to the accuracy of the translation and to bibliographical issues. The author focuses on four main principles: the intertextual relationship of the Elegies to the rest of the author's canon; its reflection of the influence of Erasmian humanist pedagogy, imitatio and aemulatio; its status as the standard English Amores until the Glorious Revolution, part of the larger phenomenon of pan-European Renaissance Ovidianism; its participation in the genre of the sonnet sequence. He explores how translating the Amores into the Elegies profited Marlowe as a writer, a kind of literary archaeology that explains why he may have commenced such an undertaking. Marlowe's Ovid adds to the body of scholarly work in a number of subfields, including classical influences in English literature, translation, sexuality in literature, early modern poetry and drama, and Marlowe and his milieu.