Brepols Online Books Medieval Monographs Archive v2016 - bobar16mome

This book consists of a close study of a number of verse texts chiefly drawn from the Exeter Book of Old English poetry. All of these texts are enigmatic. Some are outright riddles, while others (such as the elegies) are riddle-like in their manner of simultaneously giving and withholding information. The author approaches these poems as microcosms of the art of Old English poetry in general, which (particularly in its more lyrical forms) relies on its audience’s ability to decipher metaphorical language and to fill out details that remain unexpressed. The chief claim advanced is that Old English poetry is a good deal more playful than is often acknowledged, so that the art of interpreting it can require a kind of ‘game strategy’ whereby riddling authors match their wits against adventurous readers. Innovative readings of a number of poems are offered, while the whole collection of Exeter Book riddles is given a set of answers posed in the language of the riddler. The literary use of runes in The Rune Poem, The Husband’s Message, and Cynewulf ’s runic signatures comes under close scrutiny, and the thesis is advanced that Anglo-Saxon runes (particularly those that lacked stable conventional names) were sometimes used as initialisms. The book combines the methods of rigorous philology and imaginative literary analysis

A partir des premières décennies du 13e siècle, la transmission de la science et de la connaissance dans une Europe unifiée par la langue, la religion et le droit, se prévaut d'un nouveau système de production du livre. Le manuscrit réalisé à l'aide de l'exemplar et de la pecia n'est plus seulement un objet de luxe, mais devient aussi un instrument pour la diffusion de la Bible, des Pères de l'Eglise, d'Aristote, des ouvrages arabes, en un mot de tous les textes qui nourrissent la scolastique, grâce à un nouveau système révolutionnaire qui leur assure une diffusion plus grande. A cette production, viennent s'ajouter les fruits même de la scolastique, à savoir les summae, les quodlibeta, les quaestiones et les commentaires.

Ce volume recense pour la première fois toutes les listes de taxation et des exemplaria découverts jusqu'à nos jours, depuis ceux connus depuis longtemps, provenant des universités de Paris, Bologne, Padoue etc., jusqu'aux moins connus conservés actuellement à Uppsala, Dubrovnik, Olomouc, Autun, Montpellier, Greiswald etc. Les sources documentaires rassemblées attestent la diffusion par exemplar et pecia de plus de 600 oeuvres.

La seconde partie du livre contient la description de 900 oeuvres extraites des sources documentaires ou attestées dans des manuscrits portant des indications de pecia et exemplaria. Il s'agit non seulement de textes en usage dans les facultés de théologie, de philosophie, de médecine et de droit, mais aussi des oeuvres qui ne faisaient pas partie du curriculum normal des études, à savoir la Legenda de Jacques de Voragine, les epistolae de Pierre de la Vigne, des summae confessorum, des summae sermonum et des encyclopédies. Ce corpus comprend la description de plus de 2800 manuscrits à pièces et exemplaria - 1800 provenant d'un index inédit du fichier de Destrez -. Transportés dans les lieux d'origine des étudiants, pour la plupart clercs, formatés dans les universités italiennes et françaises, les manuscrits actuellement conservés dans toutes les régions d'Europe (de l'Espagne à la Finlande, de l'Angleterre à la Pologne), constituent le témoignage matériel et culturel le plus concret de l'extraordinaire vitalité intellectuelle des 13e et 14e siècles. Cet ouvrage constitue donc un instrument de travail irremplaçable et de première main, non seulement pour les spécialistes des manuscrits, mais aussi pour tous les médiévistes

Thomas Percy was the first serious translator of Old Norse-Icelandic poetry into English. He published his Five Pieces of Runic Poetry in London in 1763 and in 1770 published his translation of Mallet's very influential work on early Scandinavian literature and culture as Northern Antiquities (with extensive annotations and additions by Percy himself). In publishing Five Pieces, Percy was influenced by the success of Macpherson's first volume of Ossian poetry (1760) and his own wide-ranging interest in ancient, especially 'gothic' poetry. Five Pieces had a mixed reception and was never republished as a separate work, but reappeared as an appendix to the second edn. of Northern Antiquities. Nevertheless, it was a seminal work in the history of reception and understanding of Old Norse poetry in Britain and it also has more general significance in our understanding of the development of the discipline of Old Norse-Icelandic studies. This work makes available to the modern scholarly community the work of one of the pioneers of the discipline and produces in easily accessible format a text that is currently only available as a rare book. The study comprises a facsimile of the 1763 edition, with facing-page notes to allow the modern reader to situate Percy's work in its intellectual context, together with an introduction on Percy himself, his work on Old Norse-Icelandic studies, and the contemporary context of the reception of Old Norse poetry in Britain (and to some extent in the rest of Europe). In addition, this study publishes eight other poetic translations (one from Old English and the others from Old Icelandic) that Percy completed about the same time as the translations now in Five Pieces of Runic Poetry, but did not then publish, due to the restrictions of contemporary tolerance for demanding or difficult 'ancient' poetry. This publication reveals his full range as a translator for the first time.