On Fri, 25 Sep 1998, Bella Millett wrote:
> the author of _Ancrene
> Wisse_, the C13 ME rule for anchoresses I'm editing, sometimes comes
> up with 'portmanteau' Latin quotations, where two Scriptural texts
> sharing the same keyword are merged, and at one point applies the
> standard exegesis of one 'widows and orphans' Scriptural quotation to
> another whose exegetical tradition is quite different (concordance
> rather than hypertext thinking perhaps, but the same kind of
> non-linear association).
I think this sort of thing is particularly interesting because it
represents the victory, at least in the monastic context, of the
Ambrosian style of allusive exegesis. In one of his writings (on the
sacrifice of Isaac, I believe, but I haven't read it for a long time),
he free-associates, so to speak, an entire chain of scriptural
passages which have in common the word 'blood', using them to
illuminate one another in a way which is very foreign indeed to our
modern ways of reading the Bible. I think that Jean LeClercq 'alludes'
to this sort of thing in the section on the 'lectio diuina' in _Love
of Learning_. In later preaching and exegesis, you sometimes see
the exactly opposite approach arising from the use of 'distinctiones',
because there passages in which the same word is used in different
senses are being chained together, as it were.
I think the worst example I have ever seem of scriptural quotation
passing into scriptural allusion (which was sort of where this
conversation started) is in a pastoral manual that we were supposed to
transcribe a section from as a class exercise in the palaeography
class I took from Leonard Boyle, in which the most familar passages
were given only by the first letter of each word in a verse:
Philippians 2.9 appeared as d. i. n. q. e. s. o. n.
Abigail
Records of Early English Drama/ Victoria College/ 150 Charles Street W
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