What Nature Does Not Teach: Didactic Literature in the Medieval and Early Modern Period

by Ruys, Juanita Feros

• ISBN13: 9782503525969
• ISBN10: 2503525962
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-12-31
• Publisher: Isd

Summary

This interdisciplinary volume 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.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. xi
List of Illustrations	p. xiii
Introduction: Approaches to Didactic Literature-Meaning, Intent, Audience, Social Effect	p. 1
Constructing Didactic Intent and Persona
The Pseudo-Aristotelian Secret of Secrets as a Didactic Text	p. 41
Preaching and Teaching: The Codex Rustici as Confused Pilgrimage Tale	p. 59
`Nee en Ytale': Christine de Pizan's Migrant Didactic Voice	p. 81
Children and Families
Vladimir Monomakh's Instruction: An Old Russian Pedagogic Treatise	p. 109
Didactic `I's and the Voice of Experience in Advice from Medieval and Early-Modern Parents to Their Children	p. 129
`The world must be peopled': Children and Their Context in Renaissance Florence	p. 163
Women, Teaching, Gender
Women Teachers in Early Byzantine Hagiography	p. 189
Thomasin von Zerclaere's Der Welsche Gast and Hugo von Trimberg's Der Renner: Two Middle High German Didactic Writers Focus on Gender Relations	p. 205
Guidance for Men Who Minister to Women in the Liber de reformatione monasterorium of Johannes Busch	p. 231
Elizabethan Drama and The Instruction of a Christian Woman by Juan Luis Vives	p. 261
English Translations of Didactic Literature for Women to 1550	p. 287
Literacy, Piety, Heresy, Control
Lawrence of Amalfi and the Boundary between the Oral and the Written in Eleventh-Century Europe	p. 305
Master Vacarius, Speroni, and Heresy: Law and Theology as Didactic Literature in the Twelfth Century	p. 345
`For lewed men y vndyr toke on englyssh tonge to make this boke': Handlyng Synne and English Didactic Writing for the Laity	p. 377
Anglo-Latin Collections of the Gesta Romanorum and Their Role in the Cure of Souls	p. 401
The Classical Tradition and Early-Modern Didactic
`Dulces discet ab arte sonos': The Latin Didactic Poem on Music of Philomathes (Vienna, 1512)	p. 427
Vindicating Vulcan: Renaissance Manuals of Mining and Metallurgy	p. 449
Astronomy and Philosophical Orientation in Classical and Renaissance Didactic Poetry	p. 473
Sleeping with the Enemy: Tommaso Ceva's Use and Abuse of Lucretius in the Philosophia novo-antiqua (Milan, 1704)	p. 497
List of Contributors	p. 521
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