Building the Text: Architecture as Metaphor in Late Medieval and Early Modern France

ISBN-13: 9780198159599 / Angielski / Twarda / 1998 / 256 str.

David Cowling

Opis

Descriptions of imaginary buildings abound in late medieval and early modern texts in France. This book examines the reasons for their popularity and analyzes the way in which metaphors of the building were used by writers as a tools of persuasion. One such writer was Jean Lemaire (c.1473-after 1515) who used architectural metaphor both to praise his patrons and to advertise his own talents, while drawing on and transforming a tradition of writing popularized by his rhetoriqueur predecessors.
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Recenzje

This exciting and valuable book addresses a motif strikingly frequent in rhetorique writing, the description of imaginary buildings in allegorical contexts ... An impressively wide range of documentation is mobilized to illustrate the accumulation of the building's connotative potential; these historical surveys are in themselves extremely useful resources, which scholars of other periods and literatures could consult with profit. Equally admirable is the judiciousness and sophistication with which Cowling examines diverse texts ... Medievalists, early modern specialists, and comparatists alike should find this study extremely rewarding.