Interpretation: Medieval and Modern

Studies of approaches to texts by a variety of English medieval writers. The essays in this volume, from the 1992 J.A.W. Bennett Symposium, explore varied aspects of the interpretation of texts in middle English literature, and, in one case, a modern interpretation of medieval material. A study of thedissenting hermeneutics of the Lollards as against a scholastic synthesis and an analysis of the role of medieval figures in Caryl Churchill's play Top Girls opens the volume. A section then illustrates the exploitation ofthe term interpresby Aldhelm and Bede, the problem of interpreting popular narrative poetry by taking into account the dynamics of performance, and the role of the translator as `cross-cultural go-between'. A discussion ofcases of authorial awareness of genre and bygenres is followed by an examination of interpretative examples in the Decameron and by an analysis of the hermeneutical problems of mystical experience. The two final essays deal with the idea of pictura ut poesisin Alan of Lille andits interpretative consequences, and with the meaning of fidus interpres. Contributors: GEORGE H. BROWN, FRANCESCO BRUNI, RITA COPELAND, JULIETTE DOR, JOHN V. FLEMING, VINCENT GILLESPIE, RENATE HAAS, H. ANSGAR KELLY, KARL REICHL and JAMESSIMPSON.