medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
On Tuesday, January 22, 2008, at 9:40 am, Kerry Inman wrote:
> Sententiae and Florilegia are, in my opinion, denotatively
> the same, but different connotatively. They are very similar and easily
> confused. Sententiae are collections of aphorisms with a dogmatic or
> philosophical view. Florilegia are selections with a literary or
> religious view. A collection of music pieces would never be called Sententiae
> but often is called Florilegia or a florilegium.
Or, of course, simply Flores. The collections I've seen called _Sententiae_ typically limit their extracts to very brief utterances, e.g. in hexameter verse to only a line or two. In this, as in their title, they're almost certainly harking back to the late antique collection of Sententiae that goes under the name of Publilius Syrus that in one form or another was used into the Renaissance both as an elementary teaching text and as a provider of themes for longer compositions. Scholarly treatments of basic classroom education in the Middle Ages are likely to provide references to follow up, both on Publilius Syrus and on the more widely used the Disticha, etc. of Cato, another polymorphic collection of moral aphorisms.
The introductions to Publilius Syrus and to different collections of "Cato" in J. Wight Duff and Arnold M. Duff, eds., _Minor Latin Poets_ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: Heinmann, 1934, rev. ed. 1935) could be helpful for Brenda's inquiry.
Florilegia often include extracts of varying and sometimes substantial length. There are medieval florilegia with medical content and it wouldn't surprise me to learn that there are medieval florilegia with legal content.
> Writing in 1928, Berthold L. Ullman says. “These mediaeval
> anthologies, or florilegia, as they are technically called, have been
> given relatively little attention by scholars.” It seems that this remains
> true, but they have not been entirely ignored. The closest thing I can
> find to a
> study of the genre is Ullman’s collection of previously published articles
> entitled, Classical Authors in Mediaeval Florilegia. From the copy we
> have in the Penn library, it looks like he had these printed up
> himself and
> gave them away. There is no publisher listed for the collection and a
> hand written
> note on the cover, “with the compliments of B. L. U.”
That's Ullman's collection of his articles on this topic reprinted from the journal _Classical Philology_. The latter is published by the University of Chicago Press and I believe that press was also the publisher of BLU's _Classical Authors in Mediaeval Florilegia_.
There has been a lot of work on florilegia since, though there's a lot, lot more that needs to be done. Ullman's student Francis Newton has worked on a number of such collections. His early "Tibullus in Two Grammatical Florilegia of the Middle Ages", _Transactions and Proceedings of the American Pholological Association_ 93 (1962), 253-86 has observations that could be useful to someone seeking to learn more about the genre. Ditto for the scholarship of Richard and Mary Rouse on this topic. See:
Richard Hunter Rouse, "Florilegia and Latin Classical Authors in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Orléans", _Viator_ 10 (1979), 131-60.
and
Richard Hunter Rouse/Mary Ames Rouse, "The Florilegium Angelicum. Its Origin, Content and Influence", in J. J. G. Alexander and M. T. Gibson, eds.,_Medieval Learning and Literature: Essays Presented to Richard William Hunt_ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 66-114.
Best,
John Dillon
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