by Angelo Mazzocco (1993)
"One of the burning issues of late medieval and early Renaissance Italy was the question of the language. The single most important figure to treat this subject in the late Middle Ages was Dante Alighieri. The Dantean argument on language with its implicit acknowledgment of a classical bilingualism and its faith in the efficacy of the vernacular stimulated and defined the debate on language among the humanists of the fifteenth century."--BOOK JACKET. "This book aims at a novel and open-ended reading of Dante's literature on language and at a systematic reconstruction of the whole body of humanistic literature on linguistic phenomena. In so doing, it recaptures the theoretical assumptions - philological empiricism, political ideology, stylistic imperatives, literary aspirations - that shaped the thinking of Bruni, Biondo, Alberti, Guarino, Poggio, Filelfo, Valla, Landino and Lorenzo de' Medici. The work, therefore, goes beyond the strict, technical periphery of linguistic enquiry, and it becomes a study of intellectual history."--BOOK JACKET.
Stephen J. McKenna
"In this volume, Stephen J. McKenna provides the first book-length treatment of Adam Smith's rhetorical theory, focusing on his theory of rhetorical propriety - the means by which effective communication is adapted to the variables of subject, audience, speaker or writer, purpose, and moment - and the centrality of this concept to his thought."--BOOK JACKET.
Pierre J. Payer
The later Middle Ages saw the emergence of an integral theory of human sexuality, a systematic account of its origins, role, and significance in the divine plan. Instead of simply dismissing medieval views of sex as misogynist and guilt-ridden, Pierre Payer urges a re-examination of medieval writers' understanding of sexuality within the context of their cosmological perspective. He traces the developing consensus about what was thought to be the nature, purpose, and morality of sex as conceived by writers and theologians during this period. Concentrating on the positive dimension of medieval thought on sexuality, Payer first examines views on Paradise, the Fall, and original sin and its transmission. There follows an extended discussion of marriage as the sole outlet for legitimate sexual intercourse. He then turns to the broader question of the control of sexual impulses and desires through the virtue of temperance. The book concludes with a description of the virtue of virginity, which was seen to be the apex of temperance and the ideal of Christian living. Payer has assembled a vast number of textual sources from the late medieval period, presenting to the reader a variety of opinions, their development, and underlying presuppositions.
John McKinnell
"Close examination of the significant theme of other-worldly encounters in Norse myth and legend, including giantesses, monsters and the dead"--Provided by publisher
Giuseppe Mazzotta
In a masterly synthesis of historical and literary analysis, Giuseppe Mazzotta shows how medieval knowledge systems - the cycle of the liberal arts, ethics, politics, and theology - interacted with poetry and elevated the Divine Comedy to a central position in shaping all other forms of discursive knowledge. To trace the circle of Dante's intellectual concerns, Mazzotta examines the structure and aims of medieval encyclopedias especially in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; the medieval classification of knowledge; the battle of the arts; the role of the imagination; the tension between knowledge and vision; and Dante's theological speculations in his constitution of what Mazzotta calls aesthetic, ludic theology. As a poet, Dante puts himself at the center of intellectual debates of his time and radically redefines their configuration. In this book, Mazzotta offers powerful new readings of a poet who stands amid his culture's crisis and fragmentation, one who responds to and counters them in his work. In a critical gesture that enacts Dante's own insight, Mazzotta's practice is also a fresh contribution to the theoretical literary debates of the present.