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Medieval allegory as epistemology : dream-vision poetry on language, cognition, and experience /

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This volume shows how late medieval dream-poetry explored problems arising from the reception of Aristotle's philosophical work concerning human knowledge. Marco Nievergelt explores how the work of three medieval poets in the genre of allegorical fiction addressed these problems in distinctive,...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Nievergelt, Marco (Author)
Format: Book
Language:English
Published: Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, [2023].
Series:Oxford studies in medieval literature and culture.
Subjects:
Jean, > de Meun, > approximately 1240-approximately 1305. > Romant de la Rose moralisé.
Guillaume, > de Deguileville, > active 14th century. > Pèlerinage de vie humaine.
Langland, William, > 1330?-1400? > Piers Plowman.
French poetry > To 1500 > History and criticism.
English poetry > Middle English, 1100-1500 > History and criticism.
Poetry > Psychological aspects.
Dreams in literature.
Table of Contents:
  • Introduction
  • 1. Medieval Allegory: Poetry as Philosophy
  • 2. Medieval Epistemology
  • 3. Agency, Experience, and Subjectivity in the Later Middle Ages
  • 4. This Book
  • PART I. JEAN DE MEUN
  • 1. In the Beginning was the Rose
  • 1. 'Une vraye mappemonde de toutes choses celestes et terriennes'
  • 2. Jean de Meun and the Schools
  • 3. Allegory, Signification, and Equivocation
  • 4. The Poetics of Faux Semblant
  • 5. The Body of Experience: Choses and Gloses, Reliques and Roses
  • PART II. DEGUILEVILLE
  • Introduction to Part II
  • 2. Language
  • 1. Predicatio: Allegory and the Place of Authority
  • 2. Learning to Argue
  • 3. Learning to Read
  • 4. Signs and Sacraments
  • 5. 'Parler proprement des choses [...], sanz metre gloses' (RR 7049-50): Exposé sur le Roman de la Rose
  • 3. Cognition: Theory and Practice
  • 1. Augustine's Soul, Avicenna's Flying Man, and Deguileville's Hermeneutics of the Subject
  • 2. Theory: Divine Illumination and Active Cognition
  • 3. The Body of Sin and the Carnal Poetics of the Rose
  • 4. Practice: Eyes, Ears, and the Spectre of Aristotle
  • 5. The Long Shadow of the Rose: Didacticism, Embodiment, and Experiential Hermeneutics
  • 4. Experience
  • 1. Conversion I: The ABC of Grace and Will
  • 2. Language Redeemed, Language Remade
  • 3. Hortus Conclusus: Lyric, Stasis, and Fruition
  • 4. 'Car les signes puent faillir' (PVH2 14,377): The fleur de lis, the Revised Pèlerinage de Vie Humaine, and the Search for a Perfect Semiotics
  • 5. The Breakdown of Language and the Experiential Subject
  • PART III. LANGLAND
  • Introduction to Part III
  • Langland and French Allegory
  • 5. The Desire for Knowledge and the Experience of Conversion: (Piers Plowman B VIII-XIII.215).
  • 6. The Experience of failure and the architecture of vision: (Piers Plowman B XIII.215-XV).
  • 7. The ends of Experience: incarnation and apocalypse (Piers Plowman B XVI-XX).