Abstract
This chapter situates the Speculum virginum within the broader context of dialogue literature in the twelfth century. The genre was employed to provide instruction in a wide range of subjects.The Speculum is unusual, however, in that it adapts a literary technique normally employed to instruct boys and young men to an extended dialogue between a spiritual guide and his female disciple. Seen in this light, the Speculum emerges as a work of great creative originality that applies the questioning technique of scholastic literature to discussing the religious life for women in an unusually vivid way.
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Notes
R. B. C. Huygens, ed., Accessus ad auctores. Bernard d’Utrecht. Conrad d’Hirsau, Dialogus super auctores (Leiden: Brill, 1970), pp. 71–131
Robert Bultot, ed., Dialogus de mundi contemptu vel amore, attribué d Conrad d’Hirsau. Extraits de l’Allocutio ad deum et du De veritatis inquisitione. Textes inédits Analecta Mediaevalia Namurcensia 19 (Louvain: Editions Nauwelaerts, 1966). On these texts and the Altercatio Synagogae et Ecclesiae printed in Cologne in 1534, see Mews, chapter 1 in this volume.
See Richard W Southern, Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, vol. 1 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 225–30.
Richard William Southern, Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 203.
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© 2001 Constant J. Mews
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Flanagan, S. (2001). The Speculum Virginum and Traditions of Medieval Dialogue. In: Mews, C.J. (eds) Listen, Daughter. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-07943-5_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-07943-5_9
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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