f “Apuntes para el estudio del personaje medieval. I. Panorama de la reflexión poetológica”

Character, in contrast to the nuclear position it holds in the literary experience of reading, has not been the target of a deep critical reflection as the one seen for other literary elements. This situation seems the result of the traditional crossroads of extreme positions where its analysis has been located, that is, the conflicting approaches called mimetic (character as a textual representation of human beings) and immanent (character as a plain set of semes), that converge on the very same cancellation of its specificity. This cancellation is even more remarkable in the case of medieval character, because one often avoids its historical alterity by practising a retrospective reading of it from the parameters of modern character, that pushes it into the status of proto-character. The aim of this essay is to provide an approach to medieval poetological reflection on character as a means of recovering its historical thickness. To this end an overview is given where that poetological reflection is divided roughly into three parts: rhetoric, poetics, and methods of textual exegesis. A reversal of the Aristotelian hierarchy mŷthos/character will be seen thanks to this overview, this being reversal favored even by the Arabic transmission of the Aristoteles latinus, in the sense that the object of poetic imitatio is located in êthos, and not in práxis, by medieval poetology. Finally, the importance of this reversal is discussed in the light of their links with philosophia moralis, Augustinian transmission of Aristotelian thought, or a particular literary production, ignored by 12th and 13th centuries artes poetriae (Arthurian literature), which is, precisely, one of the main medieval contributions to the idea of the individual.