Abstract

This article offers a reconsideration of the theory of satire found in medieval exegesis. While acknowledging the importance of recent scholarship on the subject, such as the studies by Paul Miller and Udo Kindermann, it also seeks to develop the findings of this criticism further. Particular attention is paid to commentaries that offer more unusual remarks on classical satire. It is argued that these observations constitute a second tendency in the medieval response to satire, which identifies more scurrilous and disruptive potential in the genre.

Highlights

  • The purpose of this article is twofold

  • Until comparatively recently, it was widely agreed that the Middle Ages had no knowledge of satire as a poetic form

  • Following John Peter’s work in the 1950s, it was routinely asserted that any notion of medieval satire was an unhelpful anachronism, since ‘it was not until the sixteenth century, and the conscious rediscovery of Latin Satire, that Satire reasserted itself’ (12)

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Summary

Introduction

The purpose of this article is twofold. On the one hand, it will offer a brief survey of existing scholarship on the theory of satire in the Middle Ages, reviewing the studies of medieval glosses and commentaries published over the last twenty years or so. Paul Miller warns against seeing a scurrilous or subversive element in the exegesis of satire, stating that ‘no medieval writer’ would have seen satire as a means of undermining accepted norms (‘Medieval Literary Theory’, 241). It is interesting to note that moralised definitions of the form are not the only ideas to emerge in exegesis of classical texts.

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