Muses Of One Mind

Describing how ancient discussions of literature borrowed their descriptive terms from mathematical, philosophical, and rhetorical disciplines, Wesley Trimpi shows that when any one of these three types of discourse was sacrificed to one or both of the other two, the resulting imbalance proved destructive to literary discourse. Preoccupation with exhortatory (rhetorical) intention reduced literary works to displays of eloquence or ideology; preoccupation with cognitive (philosophical) intention led to didacticism; and preoccupation with formal (mathematical) excellence resulted in "aesthetic" expression for its own sake. In tracing the relationship of the three disciplines to literary discourse through the Middle Ages, this work diagnosis the increase of such reductive preoccupations after the Neoplatoic reconstruction of classical literary theory. Since 1600 these imbalances have continued to exist, obscured by proliferating and competing "theories" and "methods" of literary interpretation. Taking theoria in the ancient sense of "inclusive observation," Professor Trimpi points to an alternative to contemporary critical orthodoxies.

Homer in Wittenberg draws on manuscript and printed materials to demonstrate Homer's foundational significance for educational and theological reform during the Reformation in Wittenberg. In the first study of Melanchthon's Homer annotations from three different periods spanning his career, and the first book-length study of his reading of a classical author, William Weaver offers a new perspective on the liberal arts and textual authority in the Renaissance and Reformation. Melanchthon's significance in the teaching of the liberal arts has long been recognized, but Homer's prominent place in his educational reforms is not widely known. Homer was instrumental in Melanchthon's attempt to transform the university curriculum, and his reforms of the liberal arts are clarified by his engagements with Homeric speech, a subject of interest in recent Homer scholarship. Beginning with his Greek grammar published just as he arrived in Wittenberg in 1518, and proceeding through his 1547 work on dialectic, Homer in Wittenberg shows that teaching Homer decisively shaped Melanchthon's redesign of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Melanchthon embarked on reforming the liberal arts with the ultimate objective of reforming theological education. His teaching of Homer illustrates the philosophical principles behind his use of well-known theological terms including sola scriptura, law and gospel, and loci communes. Homer's significance extended even to a practical theology of prayer, and Wittenberg scholia on Homer from the 1550s illustrate how the Homeric poem could be used to exercise faith as well as literary judgment and eloquence.

The Book of Memory is a magisterial and beautifully illustrated account of the workings and function of memory in medieval society. Memory was the psychological faculty valued above all others in the period stretching from late antiquity through the Renaissance. The prominence given to memory has profound implications for the contemporary understanding of all creative activity, and the social role of literature and art. Drawing on a range of fascinating examples from Dante, Chaucer, and Aquinas to the symbolism of illuminated manuscripts, this unusually wide-ranging book offers new insights into the medieval world.

This book poses an eloquent challenge to the common conception of the hermeneutical tradition as a purely modern German specialty. Kathy Eden traces a continuous tradition of interpretation from Republican Rome to Reformation Europe, arguing that the historical grounding of modern hermeneutics is in the ancient tradition of rhetoric.

English law underwent rapid transformation in the sixteenth century, in response to the Reformation and also to heightened litigation and legal professionalization. As the common law became more comprehensive and systematic, the principle of jurisdiction came under particular strain. When the common law engaged with other court systems in England, when it encountered territories like Ireland and France, or when it confronted the ocean as a juridical space, the law revealed its qualities of ingenuity and improvisation. In other words, as Bradin Cormack argues, jurisdictional crisis made visible the law’s resemblance to the literary arts. A Power to Do Justice shows how Renaissance writers engaged the practical and conceptual dynamics of jurisdiction, both as a subject for critical investigation and as a frame for articulating literature’s sense of itself. Reassessing the relation between English literature and law from More to Shakespeare, Cormack argues that where literary texts attend to jurisdiction, they dramatize how boundaries and limits are the very precondition of law’s power, even as they clarify the forms of intensification that make literary space a reality. Tracking cultural responses to Renaissance jurisdictional thinking and legal centralization, A Power to Do Justice makes theoretical, literary-historical, and methodological contributions that set a new standard for law and the humanities and for the cultural history of early modern law and literature.

Sidney's Poetics is essential reading not only for students and scholars of Renaissance literature and literary theory but also for all who want to understand how human beings write and read creatively.

In MUSES IV, 'Magic Unisons', as the title indicates, the word magic explains best those moments, when during the process of composing word sequences that gradually become verses and stanzas, and could lead to a whole cycle of compositions, like in the 'Chants of a Traveling Bard'. For love, in 'Magic Unisons', transferred into many shades of enjoyment and happy feelings, one's Muses certainly stimulate the poet with their sensual impulses: This cannot be stored like goods, but the traces of those happy moments are still embedded in the poet's soul and the souls of all people engaged in creative work. Fascinating are the times one spends looking through one's creative output of one year that usually happens at the end of it when the mood is influenced by dark ominous cloud formations, snowfall that reflects the dusky light, fine stringing rain, unexpected storms, and foggy mystical mornings. Indeed, magical unisons are unique.