LITERARY THEORY AND CRITICISM IN THE LATIN MIDDLE AGES
Organized by Jan Ziolkowski, Harvard University

[Panel as described in the Call for Papers]
Although literary theory and criticism are sometimes assumed to be the achievement of recent decades in our century, classicists know that both were practiced at a high level already millenia ago. What many Latinists are less likely to appreciate is the extent to which serious interpreting and thinking about interpreting went on during the medieval period. Readers and writers in the Middle Ages learned and developed sophisticated techniques for finding meaning in the ancient Greco-Roman literature available to them as well as in the Judaeo-Christian Scriptures. These readers and writers were trained in a curriculum that, in keeping with the direction set in antiquity, concentrated upon the verbal arts of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic. At the same time, they operated within a program that had to respond to the Christian needs of their own times. The activities of these medieval readers and writers have begun to receive their full due only in the past decade, as studies of the commentary tradition and grammar school have attained a subtlety hitherto lacking.

This panel will explore the literary theory and criticism that can be found in Latin writings of the Middle Ages. It is likely to include attention to the strategies of reading and interpretation that emerge in glosses and commentaries on classical auctores (among whom Vergil and Ovid are only two of many important names) who occupied central positions in the schools. Thus in part the panel will study Nachleben and reception. Yet it could also depart from specific authors to general topics such as allegory and allegoresis, in examining the ways in which methods of reading shaped styles of writing. Furthermore, the panel will not be restricted to studying medieval responses to classical authors, since the Latin Middle Ages have left us many new genres that include ample attention to literary theory and criticism: arts of poetry, arts of preaching, treatises on letter-writing, mythographic works, and exegetic works.

Harald Anderson, The Ohio State University
Scholarly Auctoritas and the Medieval Biography of Statius

B. Gregory Hays, Cornell University
Fulgentius and Scholarly Parody

Maura K. Lafferty, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies
Reader's (and Writer's) Guides: The Epic Argumenta in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Manuscripts

Michael Meckler, Yale University
Vetera enim Cessavere Novis Supervenientibus: Ancient Readings and Modern Writings in
Matthew of Vendôme's Ars Versificatoria

Daniel Sheerin, University of Notre Dame  
The Unity of the Officium Missae in Rupert of Deutz's Liber de Diuinis Officiis

Respondent: Jan M. Ziolkowski, Harvard University