|
Darrera modificació: 2015-01-30
Bases de dades: Sciència.cat
Henry of Lancaster, Livre de seyntz Medicines: The Unpublished Devotional Treatise of Henry of Lancaster, text edited by E. J. Arnould, Oxford, Blackwell, for the Anglo-Norman Text Society (Anglo-Norman texts, 2), 1940, xv + 244 pp.
- Resum
- Llarga i profunda meditació sobre el tema de Crist com a metge (vegeu Arbesmann); natura terapèutica de l'eucaristia sobre les ànimes en pecat. Henry, primer duc de Lancaster, reorganitzà el 1356 de forma impressionant l'hospital de St. Mary a Newarke, Leicester, fundat en la dècada de 1330 pel seu pare.
The early twentieth-century's investment in chivalry has produced some remarkably successful modern translations of aristocratic biographies, such as the Life of William Marshal, the Life of the Black Prince by the Chandos Herald, Froissart's Chronicles, and others. More recent interest in religion, politics, and devotional sensibility allows the Duke of Lancaster's confessional book to come to the anglophone table as the hitherto ignored and different type of aristocratic "autobiography" that it is.
Henry, duke of Lancaster, one of the most powerful aristocrats of his time, wrote his devotional treatise on the remedies for sins in 1354, at the urging, he tells us, 'of some of my good friends.' Its narrator implores Christ, as divine physician, to supply his blood as medicine for the wounds of sin Henry has sustained. The exposition of this central metaphor (and of other imagery) is so minutely detailed as to make the Book a fine resource for medical and cultural historians and literary scholars alike. As the work of a lay author and courtier, it is an important witness to the late medieval trend in which aristocrats, civil servants (such as Chaucer) and others joined the ranks of clerics and monks in authorship. As an allegorical and personal account of confession by a layman, it offers a unique glimpse of lay internalization and appropriation of pastoral teaching on confession, and of the sensibility of a late medieval aristocrat writing in an era of pestilence and, arguably, in a developing guilt culture. Its rhetorical and literary strategies build on and anticipate the method of French and Middle English works (including Piers Plowman). It is also an important document of court culture in the generation immediately before Chaucer (it was as an elegy for Blanche, Henry's daughter-in-law, that Chaucer composed his first major poem, The Book of the Duchess between 1368 and 1372).
- Matèries
- Medicina
Religió
Francès
Fonts
- Notes
- Recensions:
* Bateman Edward, Modern Philolog, 40/2 (1942), 215-217. URL: http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/434238?uid=36 ... 
Reimpr.: Nova York, Johnson Reprint, 1967.
|