Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry : Alan of Lille's Anticlaudianus and John Gower's Confessio Amantis

Resource Information

The work Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry : Alan of Lille's Anticlaudianus and John Gower's Confessio Amantis represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in Sydney Jones Library, University of Liverpool. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry : Alan of Lille's Anticlaudianus and John Gower's Confessio Amantis

Title remainder

Alan of Lille's Anticlaudianus and John Gower's Confessio Amantis

Statement of responsibility

James Simpson

Creator

• Simpson, James, 1954-
• Simpson, James, 1954-

Subject

• Comparative literature -- English and Latin (Medieval and modern)
• Comparative literature -- Latin (Medieval and modern) and English
• Epic poetry, Latin (Medieval and modern) -- History and criticism
• Europe -- Intellectual life -- To 1500
• Gower, John, 1325?-1408
• Gower, John, 1325?-1408
• Humanists
• Literature and science -- Europe -- History
• Love in literature
• Philosophy, Medieval, in literature
• Poetry, Medieval -- Classical influences
• Poetry, Medieval -- History and criticism
• Self in literature
• Alanus, de Insulis, -1202
• Alanus, de Insulis, -1202

Language

eng

Summary

In this 1995 study James Simpson examines two great poems of the later medieval period, the Latin philosophical epic, Alan of Lille's Anticlaudianus (1181-3), and John Gower's English poem, The Confessio Amantis (1390-3). Simpson locates these works in a cultural context dominated by two kinds of literary humanism: the absolutist, whose philosophical mentor is Plato, whose literary model is Virgil and whose concept of the self is centred in the intellect, and the constitutionalist, whose classical models are Aristotle and Ovid and whose concept of the self resides in the mediatory power of the imagination. Both poems are examples of the Bildungsroman, in which the self reaches its fullness only by traversing an educational cursus in the related sciences of ethics, politics and cosmology, but as this study shows, there are very different modes of thought behind their conceptions of selfhood and education

Member of

• Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 25
• Online access with purchase: Cambridge Books Online

Cataloging source

UkCbUP

Dewey number

871/.0409

Index

index present

LC call number

PA8240.A5

LC item number

A657 1995eb

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

dictionaries