Literary Aspects Research Articles

Le forme del ricordo nell'epigrafia del primo Ottocento

Inscriptions provide evidence of the evolution of collective representations of death. They express the grief of the living and at the same time allow to remember the life and qualities of the dead. The literary and artistic aspects of the 18th and 19th century epitaphs and the topic of memory are to be examined in the context of the Romantic representation of death, as it is found in works by Foscolo, Goethe, Lessing, Herder and others. In the early 19 th century the rising importance of the modern epigraphy is parallelled by the debate on the privileged use of Latin or Italian language. Examples from the collection of epitaphs written by Stefano Antonio Morcelli, Antonio Cesari, Pietro Giordani, Luigi Muzzi and Giuseppe Manuzzi, and new dissertations on the genre rules for modern epigraphy are discussed.

Kanon: Eenheid en diversiteit

Canon: Unity and diversityAn analysis of the present post modern situation indicates resistance to the idea of “canon” understood in terms of a normative final collection of literature. The disciplines of textual criticism and canon history show that canons function in a larger social context and cannot be understood only in terms of its literary aspect. At present two parallel viewpoints on canon are found in the Christian church. The “objective” viewpoint stresses the final literary form of the Biblical canon. It cannot, however successfully indicate the unity of the canon without acknowledging the social context of the users of the canon. The ”subjective” viewpoint clearly indicates the contingent aspect of the canon, but has problems with the way its authority operates. The probable way to go about the postmodern society is to acknowledge the paradigmatic character of the canon’s contents and the dynamical process of canonization and decanonization in which a canon is involved.

Sacred Rites in Moonlight: Ben no Naishi Nikki

Ben no Naishi (1228-1270), a descendant of a literary branch of the Fujiwara family, created an innovative poetic account focusing on her public personae as a naishi serving at the court of Go-Fukakusa (r. 1246-1259). Traditional scholarship regards Ben no Naishi Nikki as a naive record of court minutiae written without any literary purpose, but Ben no Naishi's text is constructed consciously by her devotion to sacred and secular duties as naishi (female courtiers), who as guardians of the royal regalia-the Mirror, the Sword, and the Jewels-played vital roles in rites that legitimized and perpetuated the rule of the royal family. This translation-based study situates the text within the nikki tradition, traces the cultivation of patronage relationships that led to Ben no Naishi's job at court, delineates the sacred and secular duties of naishi, explores the unique literary aspects of the work, and reassesses Ben no Naishi's work as an innovative poetic record that subordinates the stance and contents to commemorating the reign of the royal family. The translation enhances the list of works available in English from the Kamakura literary canon.

My Leader, Myself? Pictorial Estrangement and Aesopian Language in the Late Work of Kazimir Malevich

In the late 1920s, the Russian avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich embarked on a new direction in art that eighty years later continues to perplex the art historical establishment: the artist formerly known for the radical abstraction of The Black Square returned to figuration. My analysis attempts to unpack this about-face and address the many questions that surround it. How does Malevich's late work relate to the regime of Socialist Realism? Was his return to figuration a conversion, an aesthetic rethinking, or a calculated move? I argue that this return was designed to navigate the restrictions of the new aesthetic episteme and carve out a third way, ostensibly compliant but in fact containing kernels of subversiveness. This third way, I suggest, consisted of a peculiar painterly poetics of estrangement and Aesopian language. While scholarship has offered insights into the literary aspect of these phenomena, very little has been written on their pictorial incarnation. Focusing on Malevich's late paintings of Russian peasants and his 1933 Self-Portrait, I try to trace the complex art historical moment of the late 1920s and early 1930s and map out the representational possibilities of the two literary concepts.

Salons, History, and the Creation of 17th-century France: Mastering Memory (review)

Reviewed by: Salons, History, and the Creation of 17th-century France: Mastering Memory Sybil M. Jack Beasley, Faith E. , Salons, History, and the Creation of 17th-century France: Mastering Memory ( Women and Gender in the Early Modern World), Aldershot, Ashgate, 2006; hardback; pp. 358; R.R.P. £47.50; ISBN 0754653544. Professor Beasley has a distinguished history of publication on the literature written by women in the seventeenth century. Her purpose in the present work is to offer an explanation of why the position of women whom she characterises as influential thinkers and writers with an autonomous identity of their own in the seventeenth century was re-interpreted later and demoted to a minor, dependent and insignificant aspect of French golden age culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and why the role of the salon in the seventeenth century was relegated in later official representations to a subsidiary aspect of upper class, male-dominated society and one that had no influence on the canonical male writers of the 'Grande Siecle'. It needs to be read in conjunction with her Revising Memory: Women's Fiction and Memoirs in Seventeenth Century France. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990. While denying any direct concern with the historical 'truth' of the salon (p.15) Beasley argues that the reality of the position of the salon was overwritten by official myths created in the eighteenth century by the French Academy, (established by Richelieu in 1634), and the Court. As a result, although women writers had been active in the salons, and important in their own right, perhaps even a dominant force in certain genres, they were throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries represented as dominated by distinguished male literary figures for whom the women were merely hostesses. Louis XIV's determination to appropriate French culture as a foundation for his creation of his own self-image as the all-powerful ruler of an expanding empire meant that he needed to maintain the hierarchy of the learned against the 'esprit' of the cultured and official panegyric, and public myth against historical novels that personalised and problematised the role of the individual. This successful take-over has provided the basis of the later orthodox French view of the 'Grande Siècle' and its key place in the French [End Page 121] sense of national identity. Only in the last thirty years has scholarship, in seeking to add the woman's voice to history, resurrected the writings of seventeenth-century women. Beasley uses what she describes as a close reading of certain texts in order to recreate the salon milieu and its real significance. This process enables her to select the texts that best fit her argument. She is not concerned with enumerating the numerous different salons and their main periods of influence or examining how they differed one from another. She mentions in passing that there were over fifty in the period and acknowledges that not all were literary, but she asserts that all had some literary aspect. She concentrates on the most famous, particularly the salon of the Marquise de Rambouillet and her younger friend, successor and perhaps rival, Madeleine de Scudery and uses the ways in which their role was specifically reformulated as the overriding example of the imposition of an historical myth, the creation of a (false) collective memory. Beasley does not discuss the historical reasons for the rise of the salons, or their relationship with the royal court and the politics of the period, although this might add to our understanding of their function in literary society. Most of the leading Salonists had a formal position at Court and were involved in court intrigues. Madame de Lafayette was one of Anne of Austria's gentlewomen, for example, and Marguerite de Valois and La Grande Mademoiselle both royal figures and centres of intrigue. The salons undoubtedly had their political side. When Madame de Sable reopened her salon after the Fronde, Cardinal Mazarin wrote that the Frondeurs were regrouping at Sable's salon and would need to be watched. More worrying is Beasley's failure to analyse the values her heroines were promoting. Were these aristocratic ladies not merely helping create an elite...

Beijing's Crypto-Victorian: Traditionalist Influences on Hu Shi's Poetic Practice

Beijing's Crypto-Victorian:Traditionalist Influences on Hu Shi's Poetic Practice Daniel Fried (bio) Introduction: Hu Shi, Imagism, and The Needs of Modernist Historiography In both political and literary historiography of China, the first flowering of a modernist national consciousness has always been traced to a single canonical date: May 4, 1919. On that date, thousands of Peking University students marched out from Tiananmen Square in protest against Western confirmation of Japanese colonial interests in China at the Paris Peace Conference. The protest march drew nationwide media attention, both because of its size and its vehemence (the march culminated in torching the house of a Chinese delegate to the conference), and in the ensuing weeks sympathy marches and strikes were organized by university students across the country. The immediate political results of the protest were not great. The Chinese government was pressured into refusing to sign the treaty of Versailles, but this refusal did not affect the treaty's implementation, and Japan took control of German colonial possessions in Shandong province. The real fruits of the protest movement were intellectual: national university life was politicized, a raft of new journals were launched, and a vibrant general debate was begun on the sources of, and possible remedies for, the national weakness that had been demonstrated at Paris. Not only were specifically political solutions discussed; much of the debate was driven by a desire for a wholesale renovation of Chinese culture. Indeed, the literary aspects of this intellectual reform movement were so strong that political historiography of modern China almost unavoidably fuses into literary history during the 'May Fourth Era.' This is the main reason why so much weight has come to be placed upon a young Western-trained Peking University professor, Hu Shi 胡適 (1891–1962), who was at the forefront of this intellectual movement [End Page 371] through his advocacy of 'literary revolution'. In a series of essays written largely before May Fourth, but which became emblematic of the movement's modernizing Zeitgeist, Hu argued for the abandonment of classical styles and the reformation of Chinese literature as a thoroughly vernacular mode of expression – only then, he argued, could the national experience of literature be popularized and made to serve as a unifying cultural force. However, Hu, who had recently finished his doctorate at Columbia University under John Dewey, was a thorough devotee of pragmatism and was averse to the advocacy of theory without practice. Hence, in addition to his theoretical essays, he also published the Experimental Collection (Changshiji 嘗試集, 1920), the first book of vernacular Chinese poetry, as a public test of his theories regarding the creation of a truly vernacular and modernist Chinese literature. What Hu did not reveal, and what most readers have failed to notice, is that the verse in the Experimental Collection is 'modern' only through linguistic dislocation. In fact, and rather ironically, the primary models on which Hu bases his poetic style are clearly traditionalist English-language poems. Hu's primary poetic reading, both as an undergraduate at Cornell and then later at Columbia University, was the standard course of poetry popular with American university students of the period: the Elizabethans, the Romantics, and the Victorians, especially Browning and Tennyson. Insofar as Hu read contemporary English-language verse, he was reading stylistically conservative poems published in popular periodicals, not the more radical work of those now considered canonical English-language modernists. And this reading left its mark: in diction, imagery, theme, and prosody, Hu's own poetry is remarkably similar to those conservative English-language models. Scholarship on Hu Shi is plentiful – his signal importance as a conduit for Chinese modernism assures continuing attention. But this scholarship has generally focused more on Hu's theoretical statements rather than his own poetic practice. As a result, a very partial debate has arisen on whether or not, and to what extent, Hu received his primary influences from the Imagist school (including T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound, and Amy Lowell, among others). Indeed, if one confines oneself to Hu's public and private statements of his poetic ideals, there are good reasons to suspect that he may have had Imagist sympathies. In his diary, Hu quotes extensively from...

If You Have No Misgivings: Churchill's Nobel Prize in Literature

In 1953, Winston Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Half a year later, I attended a course in English at a British university. We were a group of students from various countries, and we met for social evenings once a week. There were discussions and mutual entertainment as well as just getting together. On one of these occasions, I asked a question relating to the literary aspect of the course: ‘What was the reaction in this country when Winston Churchill got the Nobel Prize in Literature?’ There was complete silence. The main teacher was clearly embarrassed and looked at the other teachers, but not a word was uttered. Finally, he turned to me and said: ‘There was evidently no reaction.’ He looked around once more and added: ‘I think they were glad the old chap got something.’ The man referred to as ‘the old chap’ was about 80 years old at the time, a legend in his own lifetime, the receiver of heaps of distinctions including literary prizes.Everything that has to do with the Nobel Prize – nominations, reports, discussions – is subject to secrecy for 50 years. This is a blessing for us who are in charge of the Prize. The other side of the coin is that, as far as Churchill is concerned, I am now in a position to account for things that have been hidden so far. Let us see what the archives of the Academy can tell us, bearing in mind that one of the interesting aspects of the Prize is its function in cultural communication.

First Pictures, Early Concepts: Early Concept Books

This article focuses on a largely neglected book type for small children, picture books printed on thick cardboard that show pictures of common everyday objects such as ball, an apple or a chair, but with little text than object labels. The authors propose that these books should be called early concept books since their main purpose is to support the child's acquisition of concepts by looking at pictures. After describing three outstanding examples in more detail (Mim Chindli, The First Picture Book, Erste Bilder), the article deals with visual, linguistic, and literary aspects of this book type.

On the Experiential Link Between Spatial and Temporal Language

How do we understand time and other entities we can neither touch nor see? One possibility is that we tap into our concrete, experiential knowledge, including our understanding of physical space and motion, to make sense of abstract domains such as time. To examine how pervasive an aspect of cognition this is, we investigated whether thought about a nonliteral type of motion called fictive motion (FM; as in The road runs along the coast) can influence thought about time. Our results suggest that FM uses the same structures evoked in understanding literal motion, and that these literal aspects of FM influence temporal reasoning.

Conrad in the computer: examples of quantitative stylistic methods

A stylistic analysis of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is used to illustrate the literary value of simple quantitative text and corpus data. Cultural and literary aspects of the book are briefly discussed. It is then shown that data on the frequencies and distributions of individual words and recurrent phraseology can not only provide a more detailed descriptive basis for widely accepted literary interpretations of the book, but also identify significant linguistic features which literary critics seem not to have noticed. The argument provides a response to scepticism of quantitative stylistics from both linguists and literary critics.

More than Artistry: The Integral Aspect of Autobiography

Autobiography has generally been recognized for its literary and artistic aspects, and as a result has been largely overlooked as an instructional method in adult and continuing education. This paper argues for a wider use of autobiography in adult and continuing education programs, proposing that autobiography actually encompasses not only the artistic and literary aspects of life writing, but also the theoretical and philosophical. Based on the autobiographical writings of adult learners collected over a decade of teaching, the author suggests that in the course of bringing these dimensions of their lives together, these writers further not only their understanding of themselves and their world, but also their commitment to educational practice, action, and change.

A Gersonian Text in Defense of Poetry: <i>De laudibus elegie spiritualis</i> (ca. 1422-1425)

A GERSONIAN TEXT IN DEFENSE OF POETRY: DE LAUDIBUS ELEGIE SPIRITUALIS (ca. 1422-1425) By G. MATTEO ROCCATI During the troubled period of the Great Schism, the Hundred Years War, and the civil war in France, Jean Gerson (1363-1429), chancellor of the Lmiversity of Paris, played an important part. However, his primary importance lies in the considerable corpus of writings that he left, rather than his role in political and ecclesiastical affairs. His theological writings are well known, and the literary aspects of his works have been pointed out, especially in relation to French humanism of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries .1 In particular, his Latin poems are important evidence of the cultural climate of these years and still survive in great number — we actually know of nearly six thousand verses. Unfortunately, there is currently no complete edition that satisfies modern critical criteria.2 In these circumstances, any critical work on these texts must begin with a study of the manuscripts. 1 On Gerson's personality, cf. Etienne Delaruelle, Edmond-René Labande, and Paul Ourliac, L'Eglise au temps du Grand Schisme et de la crise conciliaire. Histoire de l'Eglise depuis les origines jusqu'à nos jours 14, 2 (Paris, 1964), 837-69; G. Matteo Boccati, "Gersoniana ," Wolfenbütleler Renaissance-Mitteilungen 9 (1985): 40-46; idem, "Aspetti umanistici dell'opera poética latina di Jean Gerson," Protrepticon, ed. Sesto Prête (Milan, 1989), 117-24; Alain De Libera, La philosophie médiévale (Paris, 1993), 477-78; Daniel Hobbins, "The Schoolman as Public Intellectual: Jean Gerson and the Late Medieval Tract," American Historical Review 108 (2003): 1308-37. I am very grateful to Kathleen Daly for the time she spent revising my English text. 2 Only the Josephina — the most important poetical work, a Vergilian poem on the Holy Family (2936 hexameters) — is available in a modern critical edition: Jean Gerson, Josephina, ed. G. M. Roccati (Paris, 2001). For the other poems, the most recent edition is in J. Gerson, L'œuvre poétique, vol. 4 of Œuvres complètes, ed. Palemón Glorieux (Paris, 1960-73), but the edition of the Opera omnia by Ellies Du Pin (Antwerp, 1706), is still useful. A new critical edition of the Latin poems can be found in G. M. Roccati, "Jean Gerson: Œuvre poétique latine" (Thesis, Paris, Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1980). Some short poems have been published in different articles: Gilbert Ouy, "Gerson, émule de Pétrarque: Le 'Pastorium Carmen,' poème de jeunesse de Gerson, et la renaissance de l'églogue en France à la fin du XIVe siècle," Romania 88 (1967): 175-231, at 224-31; idem, "Le thème du 'Taedium scriptorum gentilium' chez les humanistes, particuli èrement en France au début du XV1' siècle," Cahiers de [Association Internationale des Études Françaises 23 (1971): 9-26, at 25-26; G. M. Roccati, "Note a proposito délie poésie latine di Jean Gerson," Studi Franccsi 22 (1978): 341-49, at 343-46; idem, "En marge de l'édition critique de l'œuvre poétique de Gerson: le manuscrit Paris, B.N. lat. 3624." PIuteus 6-7 (1988-89, printed 1994): 79-95, at 93-95. 370TRADITIO Such an approach often reveals significant data, as in the case of the poem presented here.3 It is interesting in many respects: its content shows Gerson's attitude during the last years of his life toward the question of the legitimacy of poetry, a problem much debated in early-fifteenth-century France;4 its textual tradition makes it a valuable example of the editorial work of one of the chancellor's brothers, also named Jean, a Celestine monk.0 References to the life or works of Jean Gerson in the text suggest that this poem was composed during the years 1422-25.6 Some verses (vv. 47-56) in particular were first composed as a dedicatory epistle to a brief treatise by Gerson, the Scacordum,7 and then inserted in their present context ; it is very probable that the verses and the treatise are approximately contemporary.8 Later, Gerson decided to insert this poem with some others in a collection of works on...

A Gersonian Text in Defense of Poetry: De laudibus elegie spiritualis (ca. 1422–1425)

During the troubled period of the Great Schism, the Hundred Years War, and the civil war in France, Jean Gerson (1363–1429), chancellor of the University of Paris, played an important part. However, his primary importance lies in the considerable corpus of writings that he left, rather than his role in political and ecclesiastical affairs. His theological writings are well known, and the literary aspects of his works have been pointed out, especially in relation to French humanism of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In particular, his Latin poems are important evidence of the cultural climate of these years and still survive in great number — we actually know of nearly six thousand verses. Unfortunately, there is currently no complete edition that satisfies modern critical criteria. In these circumstances, any critical work on these texts must begin with a study of the manuscripts.

Algunas notas sobre la proyección literaria en el epistolario de Pedro Salinas a Katherine Whitmore

Pedro Salinas' lover with no name that appears in his trilogy in loving poetry ( La voz a ti debida. Razon de amor, Largo lament ) is presented with her own name in the group of letters sent by the poet to Katherine Whitmore. Through the analysis of these fascinating texts we will be able to establish tight relationship between his real world and his poetic world. Their content will reveal us a double documental and literary aspect of one of the best poems of love of the XX century.

Hoe akkuraat kan ’n Bybelvertaling wees? [vreemd taal weggelaat] in 1 Johannes 5:1-4 as voorbeeld

How accurate can a Bible translation be? [foreign font omitted] as example in 1 John 5:1-4An analysis is made of different translations of [foreign font omitted] in 1 John 5:1-4. The inconsistencies in and among translations are noted. The influence of the socio-cultural ecology as well as the literary and grammatical aspects that play a role in the process of translation, are then illustrated. The complex nature of translation is underlined and it is suggested that the focus should fall on the purpose of a particular translation. This will lead to the purposeful use of different translating techniques in any particular translation. [We apologise for the poor quality of the foreign font]

Performance and Literature in the Commedia dell'Arte. By Robert Henke. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003; pp. xiv + 263. $70 cloth.

The title of Robert Henke's latest book accurately reflects its innovative contents. The close study of manuscript and printed texts of various kinds—contracts, letters, poems, memorializations, scenarios, treatises, and diaries—sits alongside examination of actors, actresses, the character system, and individual roles to provide the first study devoted to the interaction, indeed cross-fertilization, between the oral and the literary aspects of commedia dell'arte, contrasting yet complementing each other as did binary pairs of arte figures.

Jerusalem: Its Sanctity and Centrality to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (review)

T H E J E W I S H QUA R T E R LY RE V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 2 (Spring 2004) 400–402 LEE I. LEVINE, ed. Jerusalem: Its Sanctity and Centrality to Judaism, Christianity , and Islam. New York: Continuum, 1999. Pp. xxvii Ⳮ 516. The last decades of the twentieth century witnessed a great upsurge in the study of Jerusalem, as both a historical entity and a mental category. The volume under review, which can be seen as part of this upsurge, is the outcome of a conference held at Tantur, Jerusalem, in June 1996—a time of great optimism and hope, aroused by the Oslo breakthrough. The new optimism and energy are expressed in this volume. The conference was held under the auspices of four academic institutions and with the support of eleven others—American, Israeli, and Palestinian. Forty scholars, including some of the most renowned scholars in the field of Jerusalem research, convened at the Tantur Ecumenical Institute for Theological Research. Thirty-three of them are represented in this volume. The articles are arranged in chronological order of their subjects, from biblical tradition to the modern period. The distribution of the articles over the different periods is a clear reflection of the state of the field. While Jerusalem in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages has been the subject of extensive learning and research, with diverse historical and literary aspects considered, the later periods have somehow been neglected , as if Jerusalem has lost its appeal for those generations, and as a consequence also for scholars dealing with them. Another angle revealed by the distribution of these articles is the religious one. Jerusalem is sacred to all three monotheistic religions, a fact that calls for comparative study of religious phenomena and spiritual experience . Nine articles in the volume deal with two or three religions; nine deal with Judaism (including biblical tradition), fourteen with Christianity, and only two with Islam. Moreover, the Moslems are completely absent from the articles dealing with later periods, despite the fact that they were strongly represented in Jerusalem during those years, in fact dominating the city for most of them. As for the thematic aspect, several subjects are treated extensively: pilgrimage as a pattern of religious behavior and its manifestations in relation to Jerusalem; relationships between theological and political factors in shaping Jerusalem’s centrality; the place of Jerusalem in Jewish and Christian liturgy; the gap between Jerusalem as symbol and Jerusalem as historical reality; the idea of heavenly Jerusalem and its bearing LEVINE, ED., JERUSALEM—LIMOR 401 upon the earthly city; how the mental map of Jerusalem and the ‘‘real’’ map fuel one another. Chronologically speaking, the most interesting periods are those of transition, when there was a shift or a major change in the political forces dominating the city. Each transition produced a new definition of Jerusalem ’s religious position and of the main reasons for its sanctity. These transitional periods receive emphasis in this book as well: eight articles out of the nine dealing with the Byzantine period concentrate on the fourth century, four articles out of the five dealing with the Early Middle Ages concentrate on the seventh. The first of these transitional periods witnessed the emergence of the new Christian Jerusalem, the second, the rise of the Moslem city. In both cases, the change of rulers did not totally erase the past, and Jerusalem’s sanctity continued to be a superposition of layers—Christian over Jewish, Moslem over Christian, each adding to the sanctity of the city, modifying and enriching it. This process also generated constant competition over Jerusalem’s ‘‘true’’ meaning and its ‘‘true’’ owner. Those articles that deal with two or three religions from a comparative viewpoint are of special interest. Jerusalem aroused, and still arouses, deep feelings among Jews, Christians, and Moslems. It was believed to be sacred and central both geographically and ideologically, as the omphalos —the navel of the earth. As Philip Alexander shows, this term had both political and polemical significance, against both Greeks (in the Hasmonean period) and, later, Romans. Most significantly, the concept of Jerusalem as omphalos was accepted both by Rabbinic Judaism and by early Christianity...

Editorial

Editorial

Die Symbolik chthonischer Götter in Sophokles' Ödipus auf Kolonos

AbstractThe significant import of chthonic elements, especially chthonic deities, in Sophocles' Oedipus Coloneus has been widely noticed and variously discussed. The focus of this discussion traced, however, historical cult and religion without regard to a possible literary aspect. This paper tries to show how Sophocles throughout the play intentionally associates his protagonist with the sphere of the chthonic and dark as a means of creating a symbolic language and as a device of personal characterization.

The Practice of Medicine in Piers Plowman

A reader can hardly miss the language of medical practice that occurs throughout Piers Plowman. Contrition, Faith, and Conscience are called surgeons, patient Poverty is a leche, and of course Sire Penetrans Domos arrives in Unity as the physician-surgeon whose soft plasters paralyze his patient. The poem contains manifold references to various medicinal practices and tools such as purges, salves, plasters, herbal remedies, and medicinal preparations like triacle and other drugs. Many of the poem's most basic moral aphorisms are expressed in medical terms. Mesure is advises Holy Church at B.1.35, later adding that is tria cle of hevene (1.148).1 The love of his subjects is the king's tr?sor . . . and tryacle at [his] nede (5.49), according to Reason. Triacle and salve are of course both pharmaceutical preparations. Yet because the metaphor of the priest as the physician of the soul is so widely disseminated in the literature of the Middle Ages, scholars have been quick to dismiss the medical language in Piers Plowman as only metaphor, without an important literal aspect.2 Overlooking the literal in this instance perpetuates, however, the common modern misperception that ancient and medieval medical theory and practice are rooted in the metaphysical and the superstitious. Samuel Bloom, for instance, hurries past the entire premodern period of medicine, summarizing it as follows: