Verfasst von:	Breen, Katharine [VerfasserIn]
Titel:	Machines of the mind
Titelzusatz:	personification in medieval literature
Verf.angabe:	Katharine Breen
Verlagsort:	Chicago ; London
Verlag:	The University of Chicago Press
Jahr:	2021
Umfang:	viii, 365 Seiten
Fussnoten:	Bibliografie Seite 317-355, Index Seite 357-365
ISBN:	978-0-226-77645-3
	978-0-226-77659-0
Abstract:	"Katharine Breen challenges our understanding of how medieval authors received philosophical paradigms from antiquity in their construction and use of personification in their writings. She shows that our modern categories for this literary device (extreme realism versus extreme rhetoric, or novelistic versus allegorical characters) would've been unrecognizable to their medieval practitioners. Through new readings of key authors and works--including Prudentius's "Psychomachia," Langland's "Piers Plowman," Boethius's "Consolation of Philosophy," and Deguileville's "Pilgrimage of Human Life"--she finds that medieval writers accessed a richer, more fluid literary domain than modern critics have allowed. Breen identifies three different types of personification--Platonic, Aristotelian, and Prudentian--inherited from antiquity that both gave medieval writers a surprisingly varied spectrum with which to paint their characters, while bypassing the modern confusion of conflicting relationships between personifications and persons on the path connecting divine power and human frailty. Recalling Gregory the Great's phrase "machinae mentis" (machines of the mind), Breen demonstrates that medieval writers applied personification with utility and subtlety, much the same way that, within the category of hand-tools, an open-end wrench differs in function from a hex-key wrench or a socket wrench. It will be read by medievalists working at the crossroads of religion, philosophy, and literature, as well as scholars interested in character-making and gendered relationships among characters, readers, and texts beyond the Middle Ages"--
DOI:	doi:10.7208/chicago/9780226776620.001.0001
URL:	Inhaltsverzeichnis: https://www.gbv.de/dms/bowker/toc/9780226776590.pdf
	DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226776620.001.0001
Schlagwörter:	(s)Personifikation    / (z)Geschichte 500-1500
Sprache:	eng
Bibliogr. Hinweis:	Erscheint auch als : Online-Ausgabe: Breen, Katharine, 1973 - : Machines of the mind. - Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2021. - 1 Online-Ressource (viii, 365 Seiten)
RVK-Notation:	EC 5127
K10plus-PPN:	1745723439