Text & Voice : The Rhetoric of Authority in the Middle Ages

Text in English and French. This book addresses the medieval text as carrier of cu1tural authority. Ideas of textuality are in many ways the key to understanding medieval culture, in which the world was conceptualised as a text, or even a book, a second book to supplement his first, the Bible. The notion influenced views of, as well as the production and organisation of, written texts, and even determined the construction of each aspect of medieval life, as time, space, or the human body were viewed as parts of the overall cultural text. Medieval textuality may thus be investigated from a wide range of approaches, and "Text and Voice" has gathered together contributions on various of this great topic''s ramifications from a number of the most outstanding scholars in the field. The book covers both Latin and vernacular texts and, in assessing medieval textuality, or more properly, textualities, it moves from questions of the Production, disposition, and illumination of texts over varying implications of the use of Latin "auctoritas", of generic experiment, and surprising absences to a consideration of various medieval textualities existing alongside one another.