bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
A Critical Colloquy: Conrad of Hirsau
Authors: Minnis A J , Scott A B , Wallace David 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Conrad of Hirsau (c. 1070-c. 1150?) is supposed to have been a schoolmaster in the Benedictine abbey of SS Peter and Paul at Hirsau, in the Black Forest of Germany. In addition to his Dialogue on the Authors, from which selections are translated below, he has been credited with several other works, including Dialogus de mundi contemptu vel amore and a Speculum virginum. The Dialogue on the Authors has resisted efforts at exact dating. Its editor, R. B. C. Huygens, regards it as having been produced late in Conrad’s life, mainly because the surviving manuscripts have a number of errors and gaps which, in his judgement, indicate a penultimate draft; it might even be his final work, left slightly incomplete at the time of his death. But, as L. G. Whitbread has pointed out, ‘faults in later copies may well be due to circumstances other than the author’s age or demise’.3 The single incontrovertible fact about the work’s genesis seems to be that it often makes use of Bernard of Utrecht’s commentary on Theodulus, which was written between 10’]6 and 1099. Three parallels with Hugh of Saint-Victor’s Didascalicon (c.1127) are inconclusive and may simply reflect a common training in the artes. In sum, as Whitbread concludes, ‘a very provisional dating within the period c.1100-50 is all that the evidence seems to warrant’. The suniving text of the Dialogue is certainly far from perfect. Some of its errors and omissions are of a kind which are difficult to explain by reference to the vagaries of manuscript transmission. There are several passages of misunderstood or garbled information which would have annoyed a more careful grammarian (to view the matter in the light of medieval standards of competence). But Conrad’s overall plan is quite clear and rather impressive. The work falls into three sections, beginning with the ‘necessary preliminaries to reading the authors’, that is, basic definitions of literary terms (like book, prose, rhythmus, metre, and so forth). Here Conrad follows Bernard of Utrecht, who had drawn on Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae either directly or through some medieval intermediary.
Scriptural Science and Signification: From Alexander’s Sum of Theology to Nicholas of Lyre
Authors: Minnis A J , Scott A B , Wallace David 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
From the thirteenth century until the end of the Middle Ages, Aristotle was ‘the Philosopher’. The stimulus provided by his libri naturales and other recently recovered works can hardly be exaggerated. He caused medieval academics to reconsider long-established definitions of and methods in all the arts and sciences, and to analyse as never before their relationship with the queen of the sciences, theology. The implications for the commentary tradition were considerable. Aristotelian theory of causality encouraged exegetes to adopt a new type of prologue organized around the four main causes described by ‘the Philosopher’, an approach which encouraged new attitudes to such matters as authorship and authority, and literary style and structure. Aristotelian epistemology gave the human faculties and human perception a new dignity; late medieval scholars afforded the ‘body’ of Scripture, its literal sense, a corresponding dignity. A new semantics emerged. Meaning was no longer believed (as in twelfth-century exegesis) to have been hidden by God deep in the biblical text; rather it was expressed in the literal sense by the human authors of Scripture, each in his own way or ways. The allegorists’ obsession with auctoritas at the expense of the particular auctor receded to reveal divinely inspired yet supremely human beings who possessed their own literary and moral purposes and problems, their sins and their styles.
Placing the Poetics: Hermann the German; An Anonymous Question on the Nature of Poetry
Authors: Minnis A J , Scott A B , Wallace David 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
When Aristotle came to the West he did not travel alone: he had many companions, the most important being Averroes (lbn Rushd) of Cordova in Islamic Spain, who lived from 1126 until 1198. This Arab scholar became known simply as ‘the Commentator’ on the Philosopher; The consequence of greatest concern to historians of literary theory and criticism is the fact that it was Averroes’ interpretation of Aristotle’s Poetics which dominated the scholarship on that text for over four centuries-until, according to 0. B. Hardison, the study published by Ludovico Castelvetro in 1570. The form in which Averroes’ main exposition of that work, the so-called ‘Middle Commentary’ on the Poetics, was best known was in the Latin translation made in 1256 by Hermann the German, a monk living in Toledo.3
The Transformation of Critical Tradition: Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio
Authors: Minnis A J , Scott A B , Wallace David 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
An attempt to describe in detail the debt of Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), Francis Petrarch (1304-74), and Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-75), to medieval literary theory, and the extent to which they transformed traditional doctrines, would require a book in itself. The present chapter, which is of necessity highly selective, offers extracts from Dante’s Convivio (written between 1307 and 1319), Petrarch’s Letters on Familiar Matters (written mainly bewteen 1325 and 1366) and Boccaccio’s Genealogy of the Gentile Gods (between 1350 and 1374). Since the attribution to Dante of the commentary-section of the Epistle to Can Grande de/la Scala is hotly disputed, and it may well not be tiles poet’s own work, tiles appears in Ch. X, as do our extracts from Boccaccio’s Short Treatise in Praise of Dante and his commentary on the Divine Comedy, because they very obviously fall within the category of ‘assessments of title new author’, Dante being regarded by many as a new actor as well as the great ‘new poet’. The Divine Comedy itself (which was written between 1314 and 1321) is believed to have established Dante as ‘one of the few poets who belong to all times and all nations’, but it is also very much a product of Dante’s own time and place, and especially of the main intellectual movement of the day, namely scholasticism.
Assessing the New Author: Commentary on Dante
Authors: Minnis A J , Scott A B , Wallace David 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The success of Dante’s Comedy was immediate and all-pervasive: only the Bible was read or recited from with greater frequency in fourteenth-century ltaly. The poem’s popularity brought with it, at all levels of society, a great eagerness for explanation, for clarification, and for more detail on specific episodes: a demand, in short, for commentary. In this final section we shall see how the critical resources developed over several centuries of commentary on biblical and classical authors were put to work on the great text of the ‘new author’, Dante Alighieri. Before concentrating upon Dante commentary proper we should note that this learned tradition represents just one aspect of the Comedy’s fourteenth century reception. This greater literary history may be considered at three levels: popular writing; learned poetry; learned commentary. The Comedy is full of good stories: many of these were plucked from their original context and elaborated in a series of popular forms. Learned and semi-educated poets alike were eager to try out the new verse form, terza rima. The efforts of learned poets to develop and extend the enterprise of the Comedy throughout the fourteenth century form instructive parallels with the interpretative efforts of commentators.
Allusion
Authors: Newlyn Lucy 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Spelt out thus baldly, m the language of economic exchange, Emon’s post-lapsanan vis10n must strike the reader as one of the bleakest of Its kind: more chillingly familiar, for instance,, because more laconically presented, than Michael’s forecast of the ‘ghastly spasm, racking torture, qualms I Ofheart-s1ck agony’ which are the consequence of Adam and Eve‘s fall (PL x1. 481-2); more objectively conceived than the personal hell of Wordsworth’s London, with its ‘tnvial objects,, melted and reduced I To one 1dent1ty by differences I That have no law, no meaning, and no end’;and more inclusive than the nightmare world of Colendge’s Ancient Manner”, ‘Alone on a wide wide sea’ Yet, for all its extremity, it is not despairing.
Secret Committees
Authors: Barrell John 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The SCI was the first of the London societies to comment publicly on what had passed in Edinburgh, at a general meeting held on I? January I794 Three days earlier Margarot had been convicted and sentenced, but the SCI seems not yet to have heard this, for the resolutions that issued from the meeting named only Skirving among those sentenced to be transported following the suppression of the convention.
The Pop-Gun Plot: A Tragicomedy by Thomas Upton
Authors: Barrell John 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
On 29 September 1794, many of the daily newspapers carried lengthy accounts of what the Oracle in its headline described as a ‘Horrible Project to Assassinate the King of this Country’. Two days earlier, two men had been arrested: Peter Lemaitre, a watch-case maker of Denmark Street, and George Higgins, shopman to a chemist in Fleet Market. Both were members of the General Committee of the LCS, and Higgins was already known to the Government: he had been a member of the Loyal Lambeth Association, and had been reported by the spy Sanderson as wishing that his uncle, a king’s messenger, might be hanged.2 On 28 September Lemaitre and Higgins had been interrogated by the Privy Council about their part in a plot which had been revealed to the Government by one of their accomplices whose name could not yet be published.
Traitor or Lunatic: The Arrest of Richard Brothers
Authors: Barrell John 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
In the early months of 1795 the Government appeared at a loss as to how to control the popular radical movement. Anxious to avoid further defeats in the courts, the law officers were unusually reticent in prosecuting publications in which the Government’s conduct alike of the state trials and the war with France was being ever more extravagantly ridiculed. They were unwilling to risk using the law of treason against Smith, Higgins, and Lemaitre, yet equally unwilling to lose the thin propaganda advantage offered by their continuing detention. Determined above all to insist that the nation was still threatened by a treasonable plot, the Government was stung by the charge that the king’s death had been imagined not by Hardy, Tooke, and Thelwall but by the secret committees, the Privy Council, and the Crown lawyers.
King Killing
Authors: Barrell John 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
At the same time as the Treasonable Practices Bill was being debated in Parliament, the House of Commons became caught up in a parallel debate about the relation between regicidal fancies and regicidal imaginings, and about metaphor and intention in descriptions and discussions of the monarchy and constitution. It developed out of the Government’s attempt to justify the bill, which by evident implication was directed at the LCS, by insisting that the attack on the king’s coach had originated in the society.
The Beginning of the Aeneid
Authors: Nuttall A D 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Arms and the man I sing’; the voice of Virgil breaks suddenly from the silence, to begin the song of Aeneas. Before these words there is nothing; after them, the story of a journey from dubiety to imperial glory, from burning Troy, through spectral cities, turbulent seas, ruined pastoral, human love trodden underfoot, through the slaughter of the young to the marble clarity of Rome, to certainty and power. We think today of Virgil as the silver-tongued poet, smooth in his cadences, yet these opening words are strangely abrupt. There are signs, as we shall see, that contemporaries found them uncomfortably bald, were disconcerted by their sudden loudness. Yet they work. As we listen or read, we are instantly subdued by a larger-than-human voice. The lyric poet Propertius felt this in Virgil’s own century. There is, I think, no irony in the famous line of homage.
The Prelude: Ille ego qui quondam ...
Authors: Nuttall A D 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Oh, yet a few short years of useful life, And all will be complete-thy race be run, Thy monument of glory will be raised.
Then, though too weak to tread the ways of truth, This age fall back to old idolatry,
Though men return to servitude as fast As the tide ebbs, to ignominy and shame By nations sink together, we shall still
Find solace in the knowledge which we have, Blessed with true happiness if we may be United helpers forward of a day
Of firmer trust, joint labourers in the work Should Providence such grace to us vouchsafe Of their redemption, surely yet to come.
Tristram Shandy
Authors: Nuttall A D 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Drunkenness is always improper, except at the festivals of the God who gave wine; and particularly dangerous, when a man is engaged in the business of marriage; for at such a crisis of their lives a bride and bridegroom ought to have all their wits about them . . . wherefore, also, the drunken man is bad and unsteady in sowing the seed of increase, and is likely to beget offspring who will be unstable and untrustworthy, and cannot be expected to walk straight either in body or mind . . . For the beginning, like a god, . . . preserves all.
David and Pip
Authors: Nuttall A D 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.
The Sense of a Beginning
Authors: Nuttall A D 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
In Frank Kermode’s sense of an ending is my sense of a beginning: his Mary Flexner Lectures delivered at Bryn Mawr in 1965 set a wholly new standard. Thereafter we had all either to think or else, in a manner, to declare ourselves enemies of thought. The Sense of an Ending (the title given to the lectures in their published form) exposes the problematic ontology of literary form. It caused my mind to race, even at first reading, between the seemingly antithetical poles of a natural end and a formal ending. At the same time I was obscurely uneasy lest, by some trick of an unperceived conceptual hyposhere, the polarity itself might be resolved into an identity.
Our Life Journeys in Beckett s Theatre: An Introduction
Authors: Worth Katharine 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
There arc as many ways in to Samuel Beckett’s art as individual imaginations to respond to it. The route I aim to follow is that de scribed by Coleridge as ‘the high road of human feelings’. It is, I believe, the way travelled by Beckett’s characters. Though so strange and rare, it is still recognizable at every step and stumble as the road we arc all taking through life towards that almost unimaginable ‘end’. Since starting on this book some years ago I have changed my approach to the extent of allowing in a little of my personal experience, including meetings with Beckett from the mid-1970s onward. It seems fitting now as it would n’t have been while we were still talking. The popular idea of Beckett as reclusive and remote has some obvious truth in it. No one who met him could fail to sense the deep re serves he had, and the capacity for withdrawal. But neither could be missed the interest in others, the courteous considerateness, the humorous or reflective observations on people and things which gave a strong impression of understanding and sympathy. In the theatre it is well known that he tended to disappear from the scene once the play was ready for performance. Such retreats, and his uncompromising pursuit of his vision, un deflected by critical reactions, may have suggested to some that he cared little about the response of audiences or readers.
Lifelines: Humour and Homely Sayings
Authors: Worth Katharine 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
PEOPLE have got used by now to the idea of Beckett’s being funny as well as formidable. Donald Davie’s idea might once have been right: ‘So black is this comedy that most English readers and theatre-goers cannot see it as comic at all’ (Independent, 27 December 1989). But it has been many times contradicted, as it was by the theatre-goers who flocked to Peter Hall’s new production of Godot in 1997. At the per formances I saw there was a palpable sense of general enjoyment as well as a frisson among aficionados looking forward to comic high lights like the battle of insults.
Taking the Life Journey and Telling It
Authors: Worth Katharine 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
IN the earlier plays the journey through the mysterious space we all inhabit is still felt in part as physical and actual, taken in present time. Later, as the travellers’ movements are frozen it becomes more obviously a journey of the mind. Old tracks are gone over again; there is a pressure, sometimes resisted, to ‘see’ it truly (‘As you could not at the time’, says the voice in Company). Whole lifetimes are revealed, in forms increasingly elliptical and compressed; only sixteen minutes of stage time is needed for Not I, three or four for Come and Go.
Magnetic Beckett
Authors: Worth Katharine 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Beckett was a magnet for performers and artists-actors, musicians, painters, dancers-before criticism caught up with the idea of the work’s immense capacity for performance (the fiction as well as the plays proper). Reviewers were often more than a step behind. Jack Mac Gowran impressed them in Dublin with his one-man Beckett programme, End of Day (Gaiety Theatre, 5 October 1962), but Happy Days at the Eblana Theatre the following year drew some confused and unhappy responses.
Epitaphs for Louis: Early Writings
Authors: McDonald Peter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
When it is read in the literary context of the mid-193os, MacNeice’s Poems begins to seem something of a public document. Yet the central images and ideas of the volume-of time, flux, petrifaction, and stasis, which in 19 35 took on topical associations-have their origin in distinctly private areas of the poet’s thought. The process of literary development towards Poems has a bearing on MacNeice’s development away from that volume. In order to bring the lines of continuity in the work into focus, it is necessary to start early, with the kind of writing that is often forgotten as ‘juvenilia’. No poet would ever wish to be judged on his earliest work; given that, the actual significance of juvenilia varies considerably from writer to writer. If some poets prefer such work to be given a quiet burial, there are others who find youthful productions, and mistakes, serviceable in the context of their mature careers. MacNeice belongs to this second category: the poetry of his early years, though for the most part dropped from the collected editions, has distinct relevance for his writings from the 1930s onwards. Indeed, MacNeice gave public burials to his early work with some regularity in his personal and discursive critical essays. The reasons for this have largely failed to engage the poet’s critics, but the juvenilia has enough inherent value to beof interest beyond the small circle of MacNeice’s scholars; this largely forgotten body of work casts a revealing light on the experience of the poetic ‘1930s generation’, the first ‘modern’ poets in England whose encounter with Modernism was, to use Eliot’s phrase for his generation’s reading of Shelley, ‘an affair of adolescence’.
The Falling Castle: 1936-1939
Authors: McDonald Peter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
However inconvenient for literary historians, MacNeice’s relation to the rest of the poets of the 1930s was hardly straightforward. Poems, written during the years when the drive towards ‘committed’ poetry was at its strongest, seemed in 193 5 something of an aggressively neutral book; MacNeice’s writing of 1936-9, and in particular Autumn Journal, was his most obviously ‘political’ work of the decade, at a time when Auden, Spender, and even Day-Lewis were edging away from the public contexts of their poetry. Samuel Hynes has shown that, by 19 36, ‘the tide of political literature was ebbing’, even going so far as to claim that by then ‘a return to the main stream of modernism had begun’.1 It is as though MacNeice, in both the first and second halves of the decade, was moving decidedly against the tide. Of course, the term ‘political’ begs a number of questions: that MacNeice’s work in The Earth Compels and Autumn Journal is not propaganda, or even card-carrying New Country writing, is clear enough-in terms of actual political ‘commitment’, MacNeice was no nearer Marxist orthodoxy in 1936 than he had been before (indeed, he was possibly even further away).
Nightmare and Cinders: The Late Poetry
Authors: McDonald Peter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Macneice’s last two volumes of poetry, Solstices (1961) and The Burning Perch (1963), mark the climax of his career, containing much of his best and most enduringly influential work. Coming after his sometimes heavy and laboured writing of the late 1940s and mid-195os, these books, along with their immediate predecessor, Visitations (1957), have seemed to critics to represent a surprising late flowering, a ‘lyric return’ for which to be grateful. Indeed, this poetry does seem to have taken MacNeice himself by surprise: writing on Visitations, he noted that ‘When the lyrical impulse did return, this interval of abstention, it seems to me, had caused certain changes in my lyric writing-I naturally hope for the better.’ These changes (‘more concentrated and better organized ... relying more on syntax and bony feature’’) stem partly from an application to the lyric medium of the principles tested in the longer poems, but partly also from a deliberate disciplining of his material on MacNeice’s part which owed much to his ideas of ‘parable’ and ‘dream logic’. Another decisive influence on this late poetry is the poet’s increasing tendency to examine his own life and the life of his time retrospectively, so that the ‘dream logic’ of the poems is a kind of Last Judgement on the poetry written in the 1930s and after.
Elegies On The Death Of Prince Henry
Authors: Kay Dennis 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Prince Henry’s death on 6 November 1612 provoked an unprecedentedly intense, widespread, and unequivocal outburst of lamentation. The King withdrew to Theobalds, the Queen to Somerset House: Foscarini reported that, even ‘in the midst of the most important discussions’, James would cry ‘Henry is dead, Henry is dead’: a little later Chamberlain noted how ‘on Tewsday I heard the bishop of Ely [Andrewes] preaching at court upon the third verse of the 37th of Esay … pray solemnly for Prince Henry without recalling himself’. All Protestant Europe joined in the mourning. Never before had so many elegies been written on a single occasion, by such a wide range of practitioners: poets of all kinds, all (or most) religious and political persuasions. Those who did, as what follows will show, included William Browne, George Chapman, John Donne, William Drummond, Sir William Alexander, Edward and George Herbert, Henry King, Joshua Sylvester, John Webster, Cyril Tourneur, Thomas Heywood, Sir Arthur Gorges, Sir Walter Ralegh, Thomas Campion, and George Wither.4 The only major writers who did not join in were Jonson, Daniel, Drayton, and Shakespeare.