![]() Rather, I examine what the nineteenth-century notion of canon did to these texts and how the current questioning and substantial reshaping of notions of canon can transform our understanding of parabiblical texts. That is why the present discussion does not aim to claim that many of the para-biblical texts are literature and should have been included in the canon of medieval literature. Thus, there are no final categories and answers because as long as there are interpretive communities, meanings are generated and operate in new ways. And that, too, is constantly being transformed. It is the environment, the interpretive community, in which the interpretation takes place that has a decisive role. ![]() Of course, the discipline of literary studies and therefore selection, hierarchization, and interpretation are complex social, cultural and political processes where almost anything is possible. The reason for this striking omission of an important group of medieval texts from the 'canonical' narratives is, as I argue, the strong bias in favour of national, secular, fictional and original texts which shapes literary studies – an inheritance from the nineteenth-century nationalising approaches discussed in the first issue of the Interfaces journal. In spite of the acknowledged crucial role it had in forming medieval written culture, the Bible and a wide-range of parabiblical texts still remain largely ignored by histories of medieval literatures. These three headings should be understood as a shorthand for what was new in each phase, not as a general characteristic, especially because exegesis in various forms continued to lie at the heart of reading and writing books in all relevant languages. Within this broad framework, three distinctive phases of book- and intellectual history can be discerned: the exegetical (c. 600 and the end of Constantinople in 1453. It is also delimited by the fate of the Roman Empire with the Latin West effectively separated from the Greek Empire by c. 1450 can be considered a unity in book-historical terms, namely the era dominated the hand-written codex. With this focus, a literary chronology emerges-as a supplement to existing narratives based on either national or formal (genre) concerns: the period c. A coordinated reading of developments in the Latin West and the Greek East-though rarely directly related-brings out some main features of intellectual and literary life in most of Europe. One way to see this bigger canvas is to consider technical and statistical book-historical factors together with the authority of the two Roman Empires (Western and Eastern) and of their religious hierarchies (the papacy and the patriarchate). ![]() Medieval European literature is both broader and deeper in its basis than what is usually offered in literary histories with their focus only on a narrow canon and on vernacular languages. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |