Chapter 30. Ecologies of medieval Latin poetics

Abstract

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.