Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1215/10829636-10689715
Michael Cornett
“New Books across the Disciplines” is a bibliographic resource that facilitates a cross-disciplinary survey of recent publications. Its scope ranges from late antiquity to the seventeenth century. Coverage is comprehensive for the large majority of North American and British publishers. Other European titles are included whenever received. Books are classified under variable topical headings and listed alphabetically by author's name. Entries include complete bibliographical data and annotations, including availability in hardcover, paperback, or ebook (OA is indicated for open access ebooks). For paperback reprint editions, original publication dates are given in parentheses. With some exceptions, books appearing here have been published within the previous two years. Many will be presented here before they are ordered and shelved by libraries. Thanks go to David Aers and Sarah Beckwith for their collegial editorial contribution.The topics for this issue include: Editions and translationsHistoriography, historians, and critical theoryRenaissance / humanismCrossing culturesFormations of empire, nation, and stateNarrative structures, lyric effectsAnderson, Jeffrey C., and Stefano Parenti, eds. and trans. A Byzantine Monastic Office, 1105 A.D.: Houghton Library, MS gr. 3. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, (2016) 2022. xiii, 394 pp., 3 figs. Paperback, ebook. [Greek text of a liturgical psalter with facing-page English translation by Anderson, with analysis by Parenti situating the psalter in its liturgical context.]Baechle, Sarah, Carissa M. Harris, and Elizaveta Strakhov, eds. Rape Culture and Female Resistance in Late Medieval Literature: With an Edition of Middle English and Middle Scots Pastourelles. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022. x, 269 pp., 9 illus. Hardcover. [Studies of medieval rape culture with editions of sixteen pastourelles from the late fifteenth through the sixteenth centuries. The Middle English lyrics are glossed, while facing-page translations are given for the Scots lyrics.]Baudoin, Marie. The Art of Childbirth: A Seventeenth-Century Midwife's Epistolary Treatise to Doctor Vallant; A Bilingual Edition. Edited and translated by Cathy McClive. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series, vol. 98. x, 235 pp., 12 figs. New York: Iter Press, 2022. Paperback, ebook. [English translation of the treatise by Baudoin (1625–1700), head midwife of the governor of the Hôtel-Dieu, followed by a transcription of the French text.]Calthorpe, Dorothy. “News from the Midell Regions” and “Calthorpe's Chapel.” Edited by Julie A. Eckerle. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series, vol. 95. New York: Iter Press, 2023. xiii, 213 pp., 15 color and 5 black-and-white illus. Paperback, ebook. [The first print edition of two extant manuscripts by Dorothy Calthorpe (1648–1693), including Calthorpe's will. The works range from Petrarchan love poetry to roman à clef and devotiona
{"title":"New Books across the Disciplines","authors":"Michael Cornett","doi":"10.1215/10829636-10689715","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-10689715","url":null,"abstract":"“New Books across the Disciplines” is a bibliographic resource that facilitates a cross-disciplinary survey of recent publications. Its scope ranges from late antiquity to the seventeenth century. Coverage is comprehensive for the large majority of North American and British publishers. Other European titles are included whenever received. Books are classified under variable topical headings and listed alphabetically by author's name. Entries include complete bibliographical data and annotations, including availability in hardcover, paperback, or ebook (OA is indicated for open access ebooks). For paperback reprint editions, original publication dates are given in parentheses. With some exceptions, books appearing here have been published within the previous two years. Many will be presented here before they are ordered and shelved by libraries. Thanks go to David Aers and Sarah Beckwith for their collegial editorial contribution.The topics for this issue include: Editions and translationsHistoriography, historians, and critical theoryRenaissance / humanismCrossing culturesFormations of empire, nation, and stateNarrative structures, lyric effectsAnderson, Jeffrey C., and Stefano Parenti, eds. and trans. A Byzantine Monastic Office, 1105 A.D.: Houghton Library, MS gr. 3. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, (2016) 2022. xiii, 394 pp., 3 figs. Paperback, ebook. [Greek text of a liturgical psalter with facing-page English translation by Anderson, with analysis by Parenti situating the psalter in its liturgical context.]Baechle, Sarah, Carissa M. Harris, and Elizaveta Strakhov, eds. Rape Culture and Female Resistance in Late Medieval Literature: With an Edition of Middle English and Middle Scots Pastourelles. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022. x, 269 pp., 9 illus. Hardcover. [Studies of medieval rape culture with editions of sixteen pastourelles from the late fifteenth through the sixteenth centuries. The Middle English lyrics are glossed, while facing-page translations are given for the Scots lyrics.]Baudoin, Marie. The Art of Childbirth: A Seventeenth-Century Midwife's Epistolary Treatise to Doctor Vallant; A Bilingual Edition. Edited and translated by Cathy McClive. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series, vol. 98. x, 235 pp., 12 figs. New York: Iter Press, 2022. Paperback, ebook. [English translation of the treatise by Baudoin (1625–1700), head midwife of the governor of the Hôtel-Dieu, followed by a transcription of the French text.]Calthorpe, Dorothy. “News from the Midell Regions” and “Calthorpe's Chapel.” Edited by Julie A. Eckerle. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series, vol. 95. New York: Iter Press, 2023. xiii, 213 pp., 15 color and 5 black-and-white illus. Paperback, ebook. [The first print edition of two extant manuscripts by Dorothy Calthorpe (1648–1693), including Calthorpe's will. The works range from Petrarchan love poetry to roman à clef and devotiona","PeriodicalId":51901,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN STUDIES","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135388044","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1215/10829636-10689701
Patrick Durdel
This essay draws on the prefatory material in Jasper Heywood's translations of three Senecan tragedies—Troas (1559), Thyestes (1560), and Hercules Furens (1561)—to show that a focus on judgment helps to expound Heywood's theory of translation. The judgments envisioned in these prefatory texts, namely, the evaluative judgments of others and the philological judgments required of the translator, highlight Heywood's understanding of Seneca's original intention as the only true measure of the English translations. For Heywood, there can be no “intentional fallacy” because intention is the only remedy against the difficulties of translation (complexity of the Latin original, deficient sources, unreliability of the printed text). Ultimately Heywood's efforts to approximate Seneca's original “sense,” culminating in the creation of a fictional Seneca, endow the translator with an authorial intention.
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1215/10829636-10689603
James Simpson
Almost every interpretative university discipline in or adjacent to the Humanities makes routine, unproblematic appeal to intention as an interpretative move. By proscribing intentionalism as an instrument of interpretation, Literary Criticism is the outlier among adjacent and not so adjacent disciplines. The introduction to the special issue “Intention and Interpretation, Now and Then” maps the prime features of the intellectual landscape concerning intention and literary criticism in Anglo-American and French traditions since the late eighteenth century. It then highlights the losses that Literary Criticism incurs by its repudiation of intention as a heuristic tool. Apart from its loss of intellectual esteem by peers, any interpretive practice that refuses to intuit intention also loses significant cognitive and ethical purchase. The nature and magnitude of these losses can be measured in many ways. Articles in this special issue measure these losses by looking to the later medieval period in particular (with contributions also from the early medieval and early modern periods), when intention rose dramatically as a heuristic tool in many discursive fields, notably in criminal law, penitential ethics, and biblical hermeneutics. The contributions also explicate the way a premodern or early modern discourse deploys and sometimes defines intentionalism.
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1215/10829636-10689617
Alastair Minnis
Scholastic intentionalism was a complicated and hardly consistent affair. Theologians sought security of meaning in the principle that a biblical author's intention could be found in the literal sense of his text. But the ultimate author of scripture, God, could have inscribed truths that transcended the intentions of inspired but merely human authors. Perhaps a text's intention was not curtailed by the temporal and historical circumstances of its composition? Further, scholastic debate rested on the assumption that truth emerges through vigorous confrontation. In practice, quotations were plucked from the full contexts that secured their meaning and conveyed authorial intention; those isolated excerpts were themselves treated as having sufficient authority to advance arguments. This history is related to present-day controversy about how the American Constitution (that modern authoritative text par excellence) should be implemented. There are striking parallels and intersections between scholastic literary theory and the “originalist” theory of constitutional interpretation; they share a common language of intentionalism, along with difficulties of interpretation.
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1215/10829636-10689687
Eva von Contzen
Chaucer criticism has always grappled with the question of intentionality. While early critics saw no trouble in identifying the voices in Chaucer's texts with the author's intention, authorial intention—not to be confused with autobiographical readings—became the elephant in the room from the early twentieth century onward. This article reviews the various approaches critics have put forward within Chaucer studies to avoid ascribing intention to Chaucer the poet. Starting with the concept of the narrator (a twentieth-century invention), three different approaches to the Canterbury Tales and their narrative situations are discussed, in which authorial intention looms large: the “dramatic,” the “detached,” and the “animated.” Then a case is made for the unavoidability of intentionalist readings by drawing on cognitive literary theories, in particular the intentional stance. When engaging with Chaucer, critics need to embrace intention as a key generator in the meaning-making activity of interpretation.
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1215/10829636-10689631
Elizabeth Papp Kamali
In medieval English texts, a common refrain, drawn from scripture, urged that only God could search the mind and heart of a sinner, and that those who judge others might face their own grave judgment on the last day. This sits uneasily with the task of issuing a felony verdict, a burden placed squarely upon the shoulders of lay jurors after the Fourth Lateran Council's effective abolition of trial by ordeal in 1215. Nevertheless, jurors did sit in judgment upon their neighbors, and evidence suggests that they were not merely assessing outward conduct but also the state of a defendant's heart and mind which, like the hand of a proband in the era of trial by ordeal, might be declared fair or foul. This essay explores how techniques for unearthing intentionality through circumstantial inquiry—techniques developed in the context of classical rhetoric and adapted for priests hearing confessions—were put to use by coroners and others tasked with investigating crimes. This, in turn, aided jurors in the perilous, even audacious, task of judging alleged felons, ultimately determining who should be acquitted and who should face the gallows.
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1215/10829636-10689729
Other| September 01 2023 Call for Submissions Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (2023) 53 (3): 657–659. https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-10689729 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Call for Submissions. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 1 September 2023; 53 (3): 657–659. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-10689729 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsJournal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies Search Advanced Search The editors invite your submissions to the following issues scheduled to appear in 2025. Send one hard copy of the manuscript double-spaced, including endnotes, along with an electronic copy (by e-mail attachment or in a shared folder online), following the style guidelines of the Chicago Manual of Style (17th ed., chap. 14 on documentation). More specific contributor guidelines may be consulted on the journal website. Manuscripts should not exceed 10,000 words inclusive of notes. Illustrations accompanying a manuscript should be submitted ideally in the form of TIFF digital files, and permissions for their reproduction must be provided before publication. Submissions pass through anonymous specialist review before publication. We do not consider articles that have been published elsewhere or are under simultaneous consideration with another publisher. Send to: Michael Cornett, Managing EditorJournal of Medieval and Early Modern StudiesDuke University340B Trent HallBox 90656Durham, NC 27708JMEMS@duke.eduhttps://jmems.trinity.duke.edu... You do not currently have access to this content.
{"title":"Call for Submissions","authors":"","doi":"10.1215/10829636-10689729","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-10689729","url":null,"abstract":"Other| September 01 2023 Call for Submissions Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (2023) 53 (3): 657–659. https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-10689729 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Call for Submissions. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 1 September 2023; 53 (3): 657–659. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-10689729 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsJournal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies Search Advanced Search The editors invite your submissions to the following issues scheduled to appear in 2025. Send one hard copy of the manuscript double-spaced, including endnotes, along with an electronic copy (by e-mail attachment or in a shared folder online), following the style guidelines of the Chicago Manual of Style (17th ed., chap. 14 on documentation). More specific contributor guidelines may be consulted on the journal website. Manuscripts should not exceed 10,000 words inclusive of notes. Illustrations accompanying a manuscript should be submitted ideally in the form of TIFF digital files, and permissions for their reproduction must be provided before publication. Submissions pass through anonymous specialist review before publication. We do not consider articles that have been published elsewhere or are under simultaneous consideration with another publisher. Send to: Michael Cornett, Managing EditorJournal of Medieval and Early Modern StudiesDuke University340B Trent HallBox 90656Durham, NC 27708JMEMS@duke.eduhttps://jmems.trinity.duke.edu... You do not currently have access to this content.","PeriodicalId":51901,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN STUDIES","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135388233","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1215/10829636-10689659
Stefan Jurasinski
Celebrated by a generation of literature scholars, lamented by E. D. Hirsch, the disappearance of the author and authorial intentions as means of interpretation has a history with branches in the study of pre-Conquest England. Long before the twentieth century, Anglo-Saxon legislators were disappearing from their laws, as discussion of their intentions in establishing them was viewed by historians with increasing disfavor. Even today, commentary on early English royal legislation seldom acknowledges that these texts enjoyed (or were intended to enjoy) the force of law in any meaningful sense. Only in the past decade have cracks emerged in the consensus that such legislation was meant for anything beyond symbolic purposes, a view backed by a much older consensus that pre-Conquest law could do no more than “declare” what had always been custom, thus revealing little about the purposes of kings and their counselors. This essay traces commentators’ reticence about acknowledging the legislative purposes behind early English legislation to disputes over codification that agitated German-speaking parts of Europe in the early nineteenth century. Yet the earliest editors and commentators prized these materials specifically because they exhibited the lawmaking powers of kings and their councils. The article examines neglected evidence afforded by early English legislation itself, finding that this earlier tradition was by no means exhausted when abandoned.
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1215/10829636-10689673
Sebastian Sobecki
This article takes issue with medievalists’ curated textual practices that coalesce on codicological intentionalism, that is, the implied position of (re)constructing authorial intention through the study of manuscripts and handwriting. Rather than criticize this practice, the article challenges medievalists to come clean about what they are doing, to acknowledge their methodological vantage point and, thus, to admit to investments in the project of intentionalism. Authorial intention is discussed as a function of the text/context debate; the tripartite division of authorship is analyzed in premodern settings; how codicological intentionalism operates is explained; and, finally, this phenomenon is shown to have parallels in a cognate discourse that has been ignored by literary medievalists, namely, the study of the Synoptic Gospels. Codicological intentionalism balances materialist with historicist certainties and probabilities; it offers a viable methodology for reconciling textual with authorial objectives.
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1215/10829636-10689645
Robert Pasnau
Abstract The Middle Ages developed a rigorous semantic account of how thought mediates between words and things. Modern literary theory, in contrast, has been characteristically skeptical about whether anything is gained by attempting to discover the thoughts of the author that lie behind the words. For medieval readers, connecting with an author's thoughts mattered, above all, because they understood reading to be a form of interpersonal engagement. The text is not simply an impersonal artifact, good for stimulating certain sorts of responses, but it is an expression of the thoughts of another mind. Ultimately, it is the value of minds connecting with other minds that led medieval readers to care about authorial intention.
{"title":"Medieval Engagement with Authorial Intention","authors":"Robert Pasnau","doi":"10.1215/10829636-10689645","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-10689645","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The Middle Ages developed a rigorous semantic account of how thought mediates between words and things. Modern literary theory, in contrast, has been characteristically skeptical about whether anything is gained by attempting to discover the thoughts of the author that lie behind the words. For medieval readers, connecting with an author's thoughts mattered, above all, because they understood reading to be a form of interpersonal engagement. The text is not simply an impersonal artifact, good for stimulating certain sorts of responses, but it is an expression of the thoughts of another mind. Ultimately, it is the value of minds connecting with other minds that led medieval readers to care about authorial intention.","PeriodicalId":51901,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN STUDIES","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135388397","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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