European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages

by Ernst Robert Curtius, Colin Burrow (Introduction)

Overview

"Curtius's book, despite its age, remains vital for anyone interested in the fate of the classics in Western Europe. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages is at once a great resource and a model of how to think about literature and tradition. It is wonderful to have it readily available again."—Anthony Grafton, Princeton University

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691157009
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/21/2013
Series:	Bollingen Series , #180
Edition description:	With a New introduction by Colin Burrow
Pages:	696
Sales rank:	731,393
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.80(d)

About the Author

Ernst Robert Curtius held the chair of romance literature and language at Bonn University from 1929 until his retirement in 1951. Colin Burrow is a fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford. He is the author of Epic Romance: Homer to Milton.

Table of Contents

Introduction to the 2013 Edition xi

Translator's Note xxi

Note of Acknowledgment xxii

Author's Foreword to the English Translation xxiii

Guiding Principles xxviii

1 European Literature 3

2 The Latin Middle Ages 17

1 Dante and the Antique Poets 17

2 Antique and Modern Worlds 19

3 The Middle Ages 20

4 The Latin Middle Ages 24

5 Romania 30

3 Literature and Education 36

1 The Liberal Arts 36

2 The Concept of the Artes in the Middle Ages 39

3 Grammar 42

4 Anglo-Saxon and Carolingian Studies 45

5 Curriculum Authors 48

6 The Universities 54

7 Sententiae and Exempla 57

4 Rhetoric 62

1 Position of Rhetoric 62

2 Rhetoric in Antiquity 64

3 System of Antique Rhetoric 68

4 Late Roman Antiquity 71

5 Jerome 72

6 Augustine 73

7 Cassiodorus and Isidore 74

8 Ars dictaminis 75

9 Wibald of Corvey and John of Salisbury 76

10 Rhetoric, Painting, Music 77

5 Topics 79

1 Topics of Consolatory Oratory 80

2 Historical Topics 82

3 Affected Modesty 83

4 Topics of the Exordium 85

5 Topics of the Conclusion 89

6 Invocation of Nature 92

7 The World Upside-Down 94

8 Boy and Old Man 98

9 Old Woman and Girl 101

6 The Goddess Natura 106

1 From Ovid to Claudian 106

2 Bernard Silvestris 108

3 Sodomy 113

4 Alan of Lille 117

5 Eros and Morality 122

6 The Romance of the Rose 124

7 Metaphorics 128

1 Nautical Metaphors 128

2 Personal Metaphors 131

3 Alimentary Metaphors 134

4 Corporal Metaphors 136

5 Theatrical Metaphors 138

8 Poetry and Rhetoric 145

1 Antique Poetics 145

2 Poetry and Prose 147

3 System of Medieval Styles 148

4 Judicial, Political, and Panegyrical Oratory in Medieval Poetry 154

5 Inexpressibility Topoi 159

6 Outdoing 162

7 Eulogy of Contemporaries 165

9 Heroes and Rulers 167

1 Heroism 167

2 Homeric Heroes 170

3 Virgil 173

4 Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages 174

5 Praise of Rulers 176

6 Arms and Studies 178

7 Nobility of Soul 179

8 Beauty 180

10 the Ideal Landscape 183

1 Exotic Fauna and Flora 183

2 Greek Poetry 185

3 Virgil 190

4 Rhetorical Occasions for the Description of Nature 193

5 The Grove 194

6 The Pleasance 195

7 Epic Landscape 200

11 Poetry and Philosophy 203

1 Homer and Allegory 203

2 Poetry and Philosophy 207

3 Philosophy in Late Pagan Antiquity 209

4 Philosophy and Christianity 211

12 Poetry and Theology 214

1 Dante and Giovanni Del Virgilio 214

2 Albertino Mussato 215

3 Dante's Self-Exegesis 221

4 Petrarch and Boccaccio 225

13 The Muses 228

14 Classicism 247

1 Genres, and Catalogues of Authors 247

2 The "Ancients" and the "Moderns," 251

3 Canon Formation in the Church 256

4 Medieval Canon 260

5 Modern Canon Formation 264

15 Mannerism 273

1 Classicism and Mannerism 273

2 Rhetoric and Mannerism 274

3 Formal Mannerisms 282

4 Recapitulation 291

5 Epigram and the Style of Pointes 292

6 Baltasar Gracián 293

16 the Book as Symbol 302

1 Goethe on Tropes 302

2 Greece 304

3 Rome 308

4 The Bible 310

5 Early Middle Ages 311

6 High Middle Ages 315

7 The Book of Nature 319

8 Dante 326

9 Shakespeare 332

10 West and East 340

17 Dante 348

1 Dante as a Classic 348

2 Dante and Latinity 350

3 The Commedia and the Literary Genres 357

4 Exemplary Figures in the Commedia 362

5 The Personnel of the Commedia 365

6 Myth and Prophecy 372

7 Dante and the Middle Ages 378

18 Epilogue 380

1 Retrospect 380

2 The Beginnings of the Vernacular Literatures 383

3 Mind and Form 388

4 Continuity 391

5 Imitation and Creation 397

Excursuses

I Misunderstandings of Antiquity in the Middle Ages 405

II Devotional Formula and Humility 407

III Grammatical and Rhetorical Technical Terms as Metaphors 414

IV Jest and Earnest in Medieval Literature 417

1 Late Antiquity 417

2 The Church and Laughter 420

3 Jest and Earnest in the Eulogy of Rulers 422

4 Jest in Hagiography 425

5 Comic Elements in the Epic 429

6 Kitchen Humor and Other Ridicula 431

V Late Antique Literary Studies 436

1 Quintilian 436

2 Late Roman Grammar 438

3 Macrobius 443

VI Early Christian and Medieval Literary Studies 446

1 Jerome 446

2 Cassiodorus 448

3 Isidore 450

4 Aldhelm 457

5 Early Christian Poetry 458

6 Notker Balbulus 463

7 Aimeric 464

8 Literary Studies in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries 465

VII The Mode of Existence of the Medieval Poet 468

VIII The Poet's Divine Frenzy 474

IX Poetry as Perpetuation 476

X Poetry as Entertainment 478

XI Poetry and Scholasticism 480

XII The Poet's Pride 485

XIII Brevity as an Ideal of Style 487

XIV Etymology as a Category of Thought 495

XV Numerical Composition 501

XVI Numerical Apothegms 510

XVII Mention of the Author's Name in Medieval Literature 515

XVIII The "Chivalric System of the Virtues" 519

XIX The Ape as Metaphor 538

XX Spain's Cultural "Belatedness" 541

XXI God as Maker 544

XXII Theological Art-Theory in the Spanish Literature of the Seventeenth Century 547

XXIII Calderón's Theory of Art and the Artes Liberates 559

XXIV Montesquieu, Ovid, and Virgil 571

XXV Diderot and Horace 573

Appendix: the Medieval Bases of Western Thought 587

Bibliographical Note 599

Abbreviations 600

Index 603

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Curtius's book, despite its age, remains vital for anyone interested in the fate of the classics in Western Europe. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages is at once a great resource and a model of how to think about literature and tradition. It is wonderful to have it readily available again."—Anthony Grafton, Princeton University

Editorial Reviews

"A balanced introduction to Curtius studies, putting this masterpiece in context as the work of a German academic 'mandarin' whom family history, character, and intellectual training made an advocate for an elite European cultural cosmopolitanism."

Sixteenth Century Journal

We have in [this work] a vast store of significant learning, and many new and important insights into the humane literary heritage and its precarious transmission.

The Hudson Review - Francis Fergusson

A balanced introduction to Curtius studies, putting this masterpiece in context as the work of a German academic 'mandarin' whom family history, character, and intellectual training made an advocate for an elite European cultural cosmopolitanism.

Sixteenth-Century Journal

We have in [this work] a vast store of significant learning, and many new and important insights into the humane literary heritage and its precarious transmission.
— Francis Fergusson

The Hudson Review

This is the sort of book which takes much of a man's lifetime to produce and which can be read again and again with profit and pleasure. In effect it is an analysis of medieval Latin literature as a major stage in the transition from the Graeco-Roman classics to the modern vernacular literatures. No forbidding catalogue of periods, authors, and works, but literary criticism and literary history by a thoughtful scholar at home in classical, medieval, and modern literature, this is a powerfully presented and richly informative study of medieval standards, values, assumptions and literary conventions.

The Virginia Quarterly Review

This is, I think, the finest work of literary scholarship in my time, by the great German philologist Ernst Robert Curtius. It is an extraordinary study of the continuity of European literature, from Homer and the other Greeks, on through Virgil and the great Latin writers, to a culmination in Dante, and moving beyond to a consideration of a long tradition that concludes with Goethe. . . . It is from Curtius that I have learned—and others go on learning—what literature is, and why I myself would call it a way of life and a way of thought.—-Harold Bloom, FiveBooks

"This is the sort of book which takes much of a man's lifetime to produce and which can be read again and again with profit and pleasure. In effect it is an analysis of medieval Latin literature as a major stage in the transition from the Graeco-Roman classics to the modern vernacular literatures. No forbidding catalogue of periods, authors, and works, but literary criticism and literary history by a thoughtful scholar at home in classical, medieval, and modern literature, this is a powerfully presented and richly informative study of medieval standards, values, assumptions and literary conventions."—The Virginia Quarterly Review

"We have in [this work] a vast store of significant learning, and many new and important insights into the humane literary heritage and its precarious transmission."—Francis Fergusson, The Hudson Review

"A balanced introduction to Curtius studies, putting this masterpiece in context as the work of a German academic 'mandarin' whom family history, character, and intellectual training made an advocate for an elite European cultural cosmopolitanism."—Sixteenth Century Journal

"This is, I think, the finest work of literary scholarship in my time, by the great German philologist Ernst Robert Curtius. It is an extraordinary study of the continuity of European literature, from Homer and the other Greeks, on through Virgil and the great Latin writers, to a culmination in Dante, and moving beyond to a consideration of a long tradition that concludes with Goethe. . . . It is from Curtius that I have learned—and others go on learning—what literature is, and why I myself would call it a way of life and a way of thought."—Harold Bloom, FiveBooks

From the Publisher