There follow succinct analyses of several key mythog raphers, including Augustine, Fulgentius, and Isidore, considered as writers responding from the perspectives of different Christian eras to the challenge of interpreting and evaluating pagan mythology and fic tion for Christian culture. 43), and then outlines the classical sources for the me dieval tradition. They are, in Tinkle's title for chapter 2, "semiotic nomads." It proves impossible to make a distinction, as she says on page 32, "between problematic 'literary' and pellucid 'source' texts." Chapter 2 offers an overview of the tradition of mythographic writ ing as "one of the very few discourses on sexuality that span the entire Middle Ages" (p. The discovery ofmultiple readings emerges from this book as not merely a twentieth-century taste it seems for many of the great medieval mythographers a consequence of their efforts to codify an cient poetry and myth-making. 61), and of the discrete realms of different kinds of meaning, discernible in his writing. 61) created by his encyclopedism, analogous to the multiplicity and mul tivalence discernible in other twelfth-century discourses, but also the sense of "the sequentiality of the creation of meanings" (p. Tinkle's account of Alberic brings out clearly not only the "chaotic polysemy" (p. Classical and medieval iconology was multiple, flexible, inconsistent, and historically subject to change and development. Basing her analysis on formidable and penetrating research into mythographic writings, Theresa Tinkle destroys the all too long entrenched belief that medieval writing on Venus and Cupid, as love deities, planetary powers, and personifications of passion, can be ade quately interpreted in terms of authoritative reifications like the "two loves" or "courtly love." No such simple and hegemonic duality as the two loves emerges from the material, whether iconographical, poetic, or philosophical, usually cited to sanction such interpretations. This is an excellent book: clear and intelligent, innovative and well balanced. ![]() Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture Series. Medieval Venuses and Cupids: Sexuality, Hermeneutics, and English Poetry. STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER THERESA TINKLE. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
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