exemplum

Uhlfelder articulately argued that in portraying his literary persona as an exemplum of man in his quest for self-knowledge, Boethius has made the whole Consolatio a cosmic image representing man as microcosm.

Uhfelder argues that by portraying his literary persona as an exemplum of man and his quest for self-knowledge, Boethius has made the whole Consolatio into a cosmic image representing man as a microcosm.

Authorial competition, therefore, could involve two types of competitiveness among historians: the first one--seen with Livy and Tacitus--was the historian rivalling his own colleagues, as if he were contending with his own maiores, in some way following their exemplum, but trying to supersede them.

The genre of exemplum literature elides the line between history, rhetoric, and moral philosophy and thus appealed to the humanists of the fifteenth century for the same reason that its popularity began to decline in the sixteenth.

In a study of the Archpriest's exemplum in relation to other medieval versions of the story, Laurence De Looze sums up the moral of the episode thusly: "The potentiality that perfect understanding and complete misunderstanding might be interchangeable and undiscoverable threatens to destabilize the whole process of meaning.

Aitken's 1922 edition, which contains a selection of sermons and a complete set of the exempla, the Marsh's fragment might have gone unidentified, but as it happens, lines 10 to 33 of Marsh's fragment correspond with sections of the thirteenth exemplum found in that edition.

The final exemplum in the poem locates the poet and his action firmly in the realm of the Iliad: