This work offers the first systematic and interdisciplinary study of the poetics of the twelfth-century medieval Greek novel. This book investigates the complex ways in which rhetorical theory and practice constructed the overarching cultural aesthetics that conditioned the production and reception of the genre of the novel in twelfth-century Byzantine society. By examining the indigenous rhetorical concept of amphoteroglossia, this book probes unexplored aspects of the re-inscription of inherited allegorical, comic, and rhetorical modes in the Komnenian novels, and offers new methodological directions for the study of Byzantine secular literature in its cultural complexities. The creative re-appropriation of the established generic conventions of the ancient Greek novel by the medieval Greek novelists, it is argued in this wide-ranging study, has invested these works with a dynamic dialogism. In this book, Roilos shows that this interdiscursivity functions on two pivotal axes: on the paradigmatic axis of previously sanctioned ancient Greek and—less evidently but equally significantly—Christian literature, and on the syntagmatic axis of allusions to the broader twelfth-century Byzantine cultural context.

Based on his wide-ranging knowledge of late-medieval Latin sermons from England as well as his editorial experience with medieval Latin texts, Siegfried Wenzel offers critical editions of five instruction manuals on the "art of preaching" dating from 1230 to the fifteenth century. Four of the texts are edited and translated for the first time; the fifth is re-edited from all extant manuscripts. Each of the five sermons is accompanied by a facing-page translation into English. The book aims to stimulate interest and new research in a field that still awaits closer analysis of the relationships among existing treatises and of their historical development.

An intriguing evaluation of the concept of beginnings in the medieval period. In the first book to examine one of the most peculiar features of one of the greatest and most perplexing poems of England's late Middle Ages-the successive attempts of Piers Plowman to begin, and to keep beginning-D. Vance Smith compels us to rethink beginning, as concept and practice, in both medieval and contemporary terms. The problem of beginning was invested with increasing urgency in the fourteenth century, imagined and grappled with in the courts, the churches, the universities, the workshops, the fields, and the streets of England. The Book of the Incipit reveals how Langland's poem exemplifies a widespread interest in beginning in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, an interest that appears in such divergent fields as the physics of motion, the measurement of time, logic, grammar, rhetoric, theology, book production, and insurrection. Smith offers a theoretical understanding of beginning that departs from the structuralisms of Edward Said and the traditional formalisms of A. D. Nuttall and most medievalist and modernist treatments of closure. Instead, he conceives a work's beginning as a figure of the work itself, the inception of language as the problem of beginning to which we continue to return. D. Vance Smith is assistant professor of English at Princeton University.

The twelfth century witnessed the sudden appearance and virtual disappearance of an important literary genre—the Old French verse chronicle. These poetic histories of the British kings, which today are treated as fiction, were written contemporaneously with Latin prose narratives, which are regarded as historical accounts. In this pathfinding study, however, Jean Blacker asserts that twelfth-century authors and readers viewed both genres as factual history.

Blacker examines four Old French verse chronicles—Gaimar's Estoire des Engleis (c. 1135), Wace's Roman de Brut (c. 1155) and Roman de Rou (c. 1160–1174), and Benoît de Sainte-Maure's Chronique des Ducs de Normandie (c. 1174–1180) and four Latin narratives—William of Malmesbury's Gesta Regum (c. 1118–1143) and Historia Novella (c. 1140–1143), Orderic Vitalis's Historia Ecclesiastica (c. 1118–1140), and Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae (c. 1138). She compares their similarity in three areas—the authors' stated intentions, their methods of characterization and narrative development, and the possible influences of patronage and audience expectation on the presentation of characters and events.

This exploration reveals remarkable similarity among the texts, including their idealization of historical and even legendary figures, such as King Arthur. It opens fruitful lines of inquiry into the role these writers played in the creation of the Anglo-Norman regnum and suggests that the Old French verse chronicles filled political, psychic, and aesthetic needs unaddressed by Latin historical writing of the period.

The Parisiana poetria, first published around 1220, expounds the medieval theory of poetry (ars poetica) and summarizes early thirteenth-century thought about writing. While the text draws on predecessors such as the Rhetorica ad Herennium, Horace’s Ars poetica, and work by Geoffrey of Vinsauf, its style and content reveal the unique experience of its author, John of Garland, a prominent teacher of the language arts at the University of Paris. John was also a well-read poet with broad tastes, and his passion for poetry, as well as for fine prose composition, is on display throughout the Parisiana poetria. This treatise is the only thoroughgoing attempt to unite three distinct arts—quantitative poetry, rhythmic poetry, and prose composition, especially of letters—under a single set of rules. The sections on low, middle, and high style, illustrated by his “Wheel of Virgil,” have attracted wide attention; and his long account of rhymed poetry is the most complete that has survived. This volume presents the most authoritative edition of the Latin text alongside a fresh English translation.

The Tria sunt, named for its opening words, was a widely used and highly ambitious book composed in England in the late fourteenth century during a revival of interest in the art of poetry and prose.

The backbone of this comprehensive guide to writing Latin texts is the wealth of illustrative and instructive sources compiled, including examples from classical authors such as Cicero and Horace as well as from medieval literature, and excerpts from other treatises of the same period by authors from Matthew of Vendôme through Gervase of Melkley. Topics treated at length include methods for beginning and ending a composition, techniques for expanding and abbreviating a text, varieties of figurative language, attributes of persons and actions, and the art of letter writing.

This anonymous treatise, related especially closely to work by Geoffrey of Vinsauf, served as a textbook for rhetorical composition at Oxford. Of all the major Latin arts of poetry and prose, it is the only one not previously edited or translated into English.

“This new day, new joy, the consummation of toil and devotion with ever new and eternal rejoicing, required new words, new songs from all!”

So wrote Raymond of Aguilers, a Provençal priest, when an army of nobles, knights, footmen, and priests from across Europe managed to conquer Jerusalem after three years of traveling and fighting. And there certainly were new words and new songs. These settlers produced a hybrid Latin literature—a “Levantine Latinity”—distinct from that in Europe, and their new literary tradition both drew on and resisted Levantine Muslim, Christian, and Jewish cultures in the newly occupied territories.

This volume analyzes the literary and rhetorical techniques of well-known authors such as William of Tyre, literary compositions of communities of canons in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and individual scholars in the Principality of Antioch. These varied sources reveal the coherent and increasingly sophisticated ways in which Crusader settlers responded to their new environment while maintaining ties with their homelands in western Europe. In a short time, Levantine Latinity emerged to form an indispensable part of the literary history of both the Near East and Europe.

The Rose and Geryon examines patterns of verbal behavior in works by Jean de Meun and Dante (with a focus on the Romance of the Rose and the Divine Comedy) in relationship with the most influential systems of verbal sins in the Middle Ages, systems elaborated by William Peraldus, Thomas Aquinas, Domenico Cavalca, and Laurent of Orléans. The book begins with a presentation of these four systems, and from there proceeds to analyze Jean de Meun's Testament as a possible source of influence for the Divine Comedy and take a closer look at Dante's prose works in search for a comprehensive theory of sinful speech. Furthermore Baika discusses verbal transgressions such as flattery, evil counsel, double talk, sowing of discord, and falsifying of words, under the heading Lingua dolosa "The Guileful Tongue," and the relationship between violence and the poetic discourse. The myriad ways in which the two iconic poets of medieval France and Italy absorb the tradition of peccata linguae in their works prove that abusive speech was not the exclusive sphere of interest of the ecclesiastical writers; secular poetry in the vernacular enriched in original ways the medieval debate on verbal vices. The Rose and Geryon addresses scholars and students of French and Italian literatures, as well as readers interested in ethics and women's studies.

While Scribit Mater highlights different medieval English understandings of the Virgin's sapient eloquence according to class, education, and gender, it demonstrates long-standing and widespread traditions acknowledging and celebrating the Mother's verbal prowess.

This volume provides a generic description, based on a formal analysis of narrative structures, of the Middle English noncyclic verse romances. As a group, these poems have long resisted generic definition and are traditionally considered to be a conglomerate of unrelated tales held together in a historical matrix of similar themes and characters. As single narratives, they are thought of as random collections of events loosely structured in chronological succession. Susan Wittig, however, offers evidence that the romances are carefully ordered (although not always consciously so) according to a series of formulaic patterns and that their structures serve as vehicles for certain essential cultural patterns and are important to the preservation of some community-held beliefs.

The analysis begins on a stylistic level, and the same theoretical principles applied to the linguistic formulas of the poems also serve as a model for the study of narrative structures. The author finds that there are laws that govern the creation, selection, and arrangement of narrative materials in the romance genre and that act to restrict innovation and control the narrative form.

The reasons for this strict control are to be found in the functional relationship of the genre to the culture that produced it. The deep structure of the romance is viewed as a problem-solving pattern that enables the community to mediate important contradictions within its social, economic, and mythic structures. Wittig speculates that these contradictions may lie in the social structures of kinship and marriage and that they have been restructured in the narratives in a “practical” myth: the concept of power gained through the marriage alliance, and the reconciliation of the contradictory notions of marriage for power’s sake and marriage for love’s sake.

This advanced, thorough, and completely original study will be valuable to medieval specialists, classicists, linguists, folklorists, and Biblical scholars working in oral-formulaic narrative structure.

Giovanni Pontano, who adopted the academic sobriquet “Gioviano,” was prime minister to several kings of Naples and the most important Neapolitan humanist of the quattrocento. Best known today as a Latin poet, he also composed dialogues depicting the intellectual life of the humanist academy of which he was the head, and, late in life, a number of moral essays that became his most popular prose works. The De sermone (On Speech), translated into English here for the first time, aims to provide a moral anatomy, following Aristotelian principles, of various aspects of speech such as truthfulness and deception, flattery, gossip, loquacity, calumny, mercantile bargaining, irony, wit, and ridicule. In each type of speech, Pontano tries to identify what should count as the virtuous mean, that which identifies the speaker as a person of education, taste, and moral probity.