Part of
Latin Literatures of Medieval and Early Modern Times in Europe and Beyond: A millennium heritageEdited by Francesco Stella
[Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages XXXIV] 2024
► pp. 498–506
Edited by Francesco Stella
[Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages XXXIV] 2024
► pp. 498–506
Chapter 30Ecologies of medieval Latin poetics
The concept of literary ecology is developed as an instrument for large-scale literary study by
Alexander Beecroft (2015), for whom the metaphor emphasizes the great
diversity of world literatures and the possibility of organizing this diversity into cultural types, analogous to the
biologist’s ecotypes. For a study of Latin poetics, the most important typological distinction is between cosmopolitan
and vernacular languages. Latin acquired an articulated body of stylistic norms (“poetics”) in antiquity as a
vernacular language; subsequent developments in Latin poetics were conditioned by the language’s acquisition of
cosmopolitan characteristics. I explore the consequences of that shift; texts discussed include Donatus’s Ars
maior, the twelfth- and thirteenth-century arts of poetry and prose, Óláfr Þórðarson’s treatise on
Icelandic poetics, and Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia.
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