speculum literature

alternative Speculum literature · alternative speculum-literature

1. rareuncountableA medieval literary genre, popular from the 12th through the 16th centuries, inspired by the urge to encompass encyclopedic knowledge within a single work.

   Mirror or speculum literature, as Jourda and Cottrell have noted, can be traced back through medieval tradition to Augustinian, Biblical and Platonic sources.

   1989, Paula Sommers, “Le Miroir: Biblical Ascent”, in Celestial Ladders: Readings in Marguerite de Navarre’s Poetry of Spiritual Ascent, Geneva: Librairie Droz S.A., →ISBN, page 50

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   However, insofar as these plays resemble statecraft or speculum literature, they also exhibit the rhetorical instability of statecraft discourse, in which antithesis fails to contain the tyrant. […] In “The Background and Sources of Preston’s Cambises,” English Studies 31 (1950): 129–35, and “The Authorship and Political Meaning of Cambises,” English Studies 36 (1955): 289–99, for example, W. A. Armstrong describes Cambyses as an example of speculum literature, in which the “naiveness” of characterization reflects the rhetoric of statecraft (p. 294).

   1990, Rebecca W[eld] Bushnell, “Tyrannical Vices: Morality Plays and Humanist Drama”, in Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the English Renaissance, Ithaca, N.Y.; London: Cornell University Press, →ISBN, page 80

   As Anna Musso has pointed out, the adaptation of the genre to a female dedicatee places the text outside the normal run of speculum literature and identifies it with the rising literature in defence of women, which argued against their inferiority to men.

   2004, Stephen John Campbell, “Tanta amorosa impresa: Isabella, Perugino and Paride da Ceresara”, in The Cabinet of Eros: Renaissance Mythological Painting and the Studiolo of Isabella d’Este, New Haven, Conn.; London: Yale University Press, →ISBN, part II (The Paintings), page 184

   The sententious lessons of Lydgate’s great work contributed to the continent-wide development of a sub-genre of speculum literature: ‘advice to princes’.

   2016, Rory Loughnane, “The Medieval Inheritance”, in Michael Neill, David Schalkwyk, editors, The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy, Oxford, Oxon: Oxford University Press, →ISBN, part I (Genre), page 39

   The Speculum humanae salvationis, or ‘Mirror of human salvation’, is an anonymous composition, originally written in Latin, in rhyming verse, sometime between 1309 (as a reference to the Avignon papacy indicates) and 1324 (the date on two copies) as part of the genre of encyclopedic speculum literature.

   2022, “Introduction”, in An Illustrated Speculum Humanae Salvationis: Green Collection MS 000321, Leiden; Boston, Mass.: Brill, →ISBN, page 1

   Synonyms: mirror literature

1. uncountableAlternative letter-case form of speculum literature.

   Berges’s view (p. 343) that this work stands outside the tradition of Speculum literature can only be valid for the mirrors preceding it; […]

   1982, Herbert Grabes, “A typology of works bearing mirror-titles”, in The Mutable Glass: Mirror-Imagery in Titles and Texts of the Middle Ages and English Renaissance, Cambridge, Cambs: Cambridge University Press, published 2009, →ISBN, part one (The mirror as title-metaphor), chapter section c (Exemplary texts bearing mirror-titles), subsection iii (Admonitory and unmasking mirrors: the deterrent image), page 60

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   His remarks on the medieval tradition of Speculum literature, into which he places the Roman, are, of course, intended to be suggestive rather than comprehensive; […]

   1986, John V[incent] Fleming, “Garden of the Roman de la Rose: Vision of Landscape or Landscape of Vision?”, in Elisabeth Blair MacDougall, editor, Medieval Gardens, Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Trustees for Harvard University, →ISBN, page 227

   The saint king’s biographies, compiled in the court, and the Hungarian royal chronicle, compiled in different segments at different times, could both be classified as a form of Speculum literature.

   1993, Kornél Szovák, “The Image of the Ideal King in Twelfth-Century Hungary (Remarks on the Legend of St Ladislas)”, in Anne Duggan, editor, Kings and Kingship in Medieval Europe, King’s College London Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, →ISBN, page 246