The Information of Alan of Lille's ‘Anticlaudianus’: A Preposterous Interpretation
For the Methode of a Poet historical is not such, as of an Historiographer. For an Historiographer discourseth of affayres orderly as they were donne … but a Poet thrusteth into the middest, euen where it most concerneth him, and there recoursing to the thinges forepaste, and diuining of thinges to...
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
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| Published: |
Cambridge University Press
1992
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| In: |
Traditio
Year: 1992, Volume: 47, Pages: 113-160 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (JSTOR) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | For the Methode of a Poet historical is not such, as of an Historiographer. For an Historiographer discourseth of affayres orderly as they were donne … but a Poet thrusteth into the middest, euen where it most concerneth him, and there recoursing to the thinges forepaste, and diuining of thinges to come, maketh a pleasing Analysis of all. Spenser, The Faerie Queene Letter of the Authors. In his account of twelfth-century ‘cosmologists,’ Winthrop Wetherbee has pointed to an essential problem in the interpretation of Alan of Lille's Anticlaudianus (1182–1183). He argues that the major theme of the poem is ‘the working out of the relation of the Arts to Theology that culminates in Prudentia's vision of God’; given this, Wetherbee argues that there is ‘something gratuitous and anticlimactic about the ensuing psychomachia and the new earthly order to which it leads,’ especially when the ‘virtues associated with the New Man are largely secular.’ The conclusion to which these observations lead is ineluctable: ‘Whatever its significance, the idealism of the “triumph of Nature,” as Alan calls it, is difficult to reconcile with the radical subordination of earthly knowledge in the central books of the poem.’ |
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| ISSN: | 2166-5508 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Traditio
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1017/S0362152900007212 |