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  3. Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry
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    • Publisher:
      Cambridge University Press
      Publication date:
      15 December 2009
      20 April 1995
      ISBN:
      9780511518782
      9780521471817
      9780521021111
      DOI:
      https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511518782
      Dimensions:
      (228 x 152 mm)
      Weight & Pages:
      0.595kg, 334 Pages
      Dimensions:
      (228 x 152 mm)
      Weight & Pages:
      0.229kg, 336 Pages
      • Subjects:
      Literature, Literary Theory, Anglo Saxon and Medieval Literature
      Series:
      Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature (25)
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    Subjects:
    Literature, Literary Theory, Anglo Saxon and Medieval Literature
    Series:
    Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature (25)
    Information

    Book description

    In this 1995 study James Simpson examines two great poems of the later medieval period, the Latin philosophical epic, Alan of Lille's Anticlaudianus (1181–3), and John Gower's English poem, The Confessio Amantis (1390–3). Simpson locates these works in a cultural context dominated by two kinds of literary humanism: the absolutist, whose philosophical mentor is Plato, whose literary model is Virgil and whose concept of the self is centred in the intellect, and the constitutionalist, whose classical models are Aristotle and Ovid and whose concept of the self resides in the mediatory power of the imagination. Both poems are examples of the Bildungsroman, in which the self reaches its fullness only by traversing an educational cursus in the related sciences of ethics, politics and cosmology, but as this study shows, there are very different modes of thought behind their conceptions of selfhood and education.

    Reviews

    ‘The originality of the juxtaposition is one measure of the provocativeness and occasional brilliance of Simpson’s vigorous and ambitious new study, which offers radically novel readings of both poems at the same time that it draws them together in an intriguing exploration of the nature of the humanist poetics of the Middle Ages.’

    Source: John Gower Newsletter

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