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Contrary Things - Exegesis, Dialectic, and the Poetics of Didacticism (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R2,171
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Contrary Things - Exegesis, Dialectic, and the Poetics of Didacticism (Hardcover)
Series: Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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This work of intellectual and cultural history seeks to understand
the recurring connection of teaching with contradiction in some
major texts of the European Middle Ages. It moves comfortably
between patristic and monastic exegesis, the Paris schools of the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and late medieval Spain; between
Latin and vernacular, between religious and secular. It assimilates
the methodologies of religious and erotic texts, thereby displaying
the investment of each in the sensuality and analytical power of
language.
The book begins by exploring Christian exegesis, in which biblical
contradiction is the textual incarnation of a Truth that is at once
and paradoxically singular and multiple. Exegesis teaches us of the
possibility of maintaining the truth in one biblical proposition
and, equally and simultaneously, in its apparent opposite. Under
the aegis of dialectic and the Aristotelian rule of
non-contradiction, however, we are next taught to read "either/or,"
and to resolve contradiction not through suspension and
multiplicity, as in exegesis, but rather through a judgment that
favors either one proposition or the other. The writers studied
here are John of Salisbury, whose "Metalogicon" is an ostensibly
moderating critique of the intellectual extremism of the School of
Paris logicians, and Peter Abelard, in whose life and writing the
forces of contradiction work with maiming and illuminating
violence.
The book then considers the teaching-textuality of two great
secular works of the Middle Ages, formed under the double
instruction of the master disciplines of monastic exegesis and
dialectic and under the tutelage of Ovid. Calling simultaneously on
the "both-and" of exegesis and the "either/or" of dialectic, the
teaching of these two texts is both biblical and
worldly--impossibly, both at once, always in motion. The "De Amore"
of Andreas Capellanus teaches two opposite propositions and
commands that either one or the other must be chosen, yet in
practice shows each proposition to be deeply embedded in the other.
The concluding chapter turns from the Latin to the vernacular
tradition to study one of the lesser-known examples of
contradictory teaching, the fourteenth-century "Libro de Buen Amor"
of Juan Ruiz, whose titular "good love" conflates the contrary
things of spiritual and carnal love, while reminding readers that
the difference between the two is urgently consequential.
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