Divine Inspiration

2005

downloadDownload PDFView PDFchevron_right

2017

downloadDownload PDFView PDFchevron_right

2023

This PhD dissertation develops incongruence as a critical category for the study of multi-text manuscripts. It argues that the makers of manuscripts in French, Occitan, and Franco-Italian between ca. 1250 and 1350 deployed incongruence to create “thought laboratories,” which are spaces for readers to engage in speculative thinking on targeted questions. In line with the habits of dialectical thinking of the time, readers were encouraged to reflect on the tensions that arise from the conflicting assessments, contradicting reasonings, and discrepant values found in the contents of multi-text manuscripts. This dissertation establishes the significant role of incongruence—defined as the dissonance in theme, tone, or logic between two or more co-present texts—in the production and reading of multi-text manuscripts of vernacular literature, which make up two thirds of vernacular books in the period 1250–1350. The introduction sets up the theoretical and historical framework for the dissertation by discussing the key notions of “text,” “book,” and “practice,” which it relates to literary studies, codicology, and anthropology. It defines thought laboratories as spaces of speculative thinking provided by multi-text manuscripts, and it proposes that incongruence was mobilized by the makers of manuscripts to direct readers’ attention to points of contention with which they were invited to engage. Chapter 1 discusses how the inclusion of obscene parodic stanzas in a troubadour songbook from Italy creates a dialectical relationship between lyrics presented as canonical and parodic stanzas that deride them through their obscene imitations. The incongruence of the obscene stanzas within a songbook that presents its contents as cultural capital worth preserving and emulating invites inquiry into the formation of a canon and the role of songbooks in consecrating a cultural heritage. Chapter 2 examines a North-Eastern French manuscript that creates a debate between a cleric and the woman he woos. The debate thematizes clerical learning and the role of gender in claims to knowledge and assertions of sincerity, since the validity of the debaters’ claims and their motivations are constantly questioned. Through the logical setup of the ending of the debate, which is incongruous with the logic of the debate that precedes it, readers face the difficulty of having to take sides in a debate they are supposed to judge impartially. When weighing the arguments, they get to perform the interrelation of gender and knowledge that the debaters expose. Chapter 3 considers the role of irony, discrepant character assessments, the presence of prose, and that of the Roman de Renart within a collection of Arthurian verse romances from North-Eastern France. By bending the expectations strongly associated with a very codified genre, these elements cast into relief the motivations that lie behind the glorification of chivalric heroes and the presentation of an ideal political order. Because several texts in this manuscript are interrupted or end ambivalently, it allows readers to think about alternative endings to the romances it contains. Chapter 4 examines a Northern Italian compilation of prose and verse historiographical material interspersed with didactic and sapiential texts. The incongruences of fact and of assessment, the incongruous co-presence of prose and verse, and the uneasy chronological ordering of texts draw attention to misfits in this collection. Readers, who are faced with a history in pieces, can reassemble texts into a history they deem more suitable, which leads to an interrogation of what constitutes suitable history. Through attention to the strategies of compilation, textual intervention, and illumination deployed by the makers of medieval manuscripts to direct the attention of readers, this dissertation argues for an intellectually engaged and creative way of reading vernacular literature in manuscripts between 1250 and 1350.

downloadDownload PDFView PDFchevron_right

Oxford Encyclopaedia of Literary Theory, ed. John Frow (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021)

Textual Studies describes a range of fields and methodologies that: evaluate how texts are constituted both physically and conceptually; document how they are preserved, copied, and circulated; and propose ways in which they might be edited to minimize error and maximize the text’s integrity. The vast temporal reach of the history of textuality – from oral traditions spanning thousands of years, and written forms dating from the fourth millenium BCE, to printed and digital text forms – is matched by its geographical range covering every linguistic community around the globe. The practice of giving close attention to material text-bearing documents and the reliability of their written or printed content stems from antiquity, paying closest attention to sacred texts as well as to legal documents and literary works that helped form linguistic and social group identity. With the incarnation of the printing press in the early-modern West, the rapid reproduction of text matter in large quantities had the effect of corrupting many texts with printing errors, as well as providing the technical means of correcting such errors more cheaply and quickly than in the preceding scribal culture. From the eighteenth century techniques of textual criticism were developed to attempt systematic correction of textual error, again with an emphasis on scriptural and classical texts. This ‘golden age of philology’ slowly widened its range to consider such foundational medieval texts as Dante’s Commedia, as well as, in time, modern vernacular literature. The technique of stemmatic analysis – the establishment of family relationships between existing documents of a text – provided the means for scholars to choose between copies of a work in the pursuit of accuracy. In the absence of original documents (manuscripts in the hand of Aristotle or the four Evangelists, for example) the choice between existing versions of a text were often made eclectically – that is, drawing on multiple versions – and thus were subject to such considerations as the historic range and geographical diffusion of documents, the systematic identification of common scribal errors, and matters of translation. As the study of modern languages and literatures consolidated into modern university departments in the later nineteenth century, new techniques emerged with the aim of providing reliable literary texts free from obvious error. This aim had in common with the preceding philological tradition the belief that what a text means – discovered in the practice of hermeneutics – was contingent on what the text states – established by an accurate textual record that eliminates error by means of textual criticism. The methods of textual criticism took several paths through the twentieth century: the Anglophone tradition centred on editing Shakespeare’s works by drawing on the earliest available documents – the printed Quartos and Folios – developing into the Greg-Bowers-Tanselle copy-text ‘tradition’ which was then deployed as a method by which to edit later texts. The status of variants in modern literary works with multiple authorial manuscripts – not to mention the existence of competing versions of several of Shakespeare’s plays – complicated matters sufficiently that editors looked to alternate editorial models. Genetic editorial methods draw in part on German editorial techniques, collating all existing manuscripts and printed texts of a work in order to provide a record of its composition process, including epigenetic processes following publication. The French methods of critique génétique also place the documentary record at the centre, where the dossier is given priority over any one printed edition, and poststructuralist theory is used to examine the process of ‘textual invention.’ The inherently social aspects of textual production – the author’s interaction with agents, censors, publishers, printers, and the way these interactions shape the content and presentation of the text – has reconceived how textual authority and variation are understood in the social and economic contexts of publication. And finally the advent of digital publication platforms has given rise to new developments in the presentation of textual editions and manuscript documents, displacing copy-text editing in some fields such as Modernism Studies in favour of genetic or synoptic models of composition and textual production.

downloadDownload PDFView PDFchevron_right

The Aeschylean authorship of "Prometheus Bound" and the exodos of "Seven Against Thebes" has long been disputed. To the best of my knowledge, no scholar any longer seriously believes that the final scene of the "Seven" can be the work of Aeschylus, and the cumulative effect of Mark Griffith’s findings about "Prometheus" seems to have convinced the majority of Classicists that this play is also, most likely, spurious. In my dissertation (UoA, 2016), which I now prepare for publication, I applied a series of well- established Automated Authorship Attribution techniques in a carefully sorted and processed corpus of four fifth-century dramatists (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes), concluding that both the dubious pieces could possibly have been composed by the same hand, who cannot be that of Aeschylus –a notion brought to the fore a few years ago by M. L. West on different grounds. The Artificial Intelligence methods (unsupervised and supervised Machine Learning algorithms) employed in my analysis allowed me to detect various macro-scale, unconscious linguistic patterns, which serve as quite accurate differentiating criteria between the dramatists included in my corpus. This quantitative approach indicated that both "Prometheus" the exodos of the "Seven" are strongly tied to the Sophoclean way(s) of writing, and the qualitative evidence of my research led me to believe that the author of these texts could plausibly be Aeschylus’ second son Euaion, who in fact appears to have been a celebrated actor in Sophocles’ dramas. This study, which brings together Classics, Computer Science, and Linguistics, is an attempt to demonstrate the value of the emerging field of Computer Stylistics in the debate about the disputed works of ancient literature, and also to trigger further discussion about the benefits of interdisciplinarity in the area of Classics.

downloadDownload PDFView PDFchevron_right

If there is anything of divine significance that the post-apostolic Church has given to the world, it is this: the idea that the New Testament is a literary body. It is not only canon – it is corpus. There is not just the Pauline corpus and the Johannine corpus. There is the New Testament corpus. However unconscious, however clumsy, however accidental or serendipitous, the formation of the canonical corpus occurred. The modern church takes this formation for granted, but no one in the apostolic age did. And surely no individual writer of the New Testament materials did either. The implications of this are profound. Because without this kind of corpus criticism, biblical “interpretation” is essentially contextless and thus, ultimately, useless. Could we not consider that though the individual writers of the New Testament are wholly conscious in their literary efforts, which precludes any idea of inspiration by “divine dictation” (as many Evangelical Fundamentalists have maintained), they are (as may be expected) wholly unconscious of the existential fact that the divine Spirit of all human communication is behind another, meta-dialogue with the world by means of the community interconnectedness of their individual dialogues? And thus, what the Church has naively assumed for centuries is far more profoundly true than could have been first imagined: that the New Testament materials – taken together, as a body – are a special incarnation of the Holy Spirit?

downloadDownload PDFView PDFchevron_right