Abstract
Chapter 5, Kenneth Krabbenhoft’s “Prequels to Nobrow: Battles of the Brows from Socrates to Cervantes,” dials up a time machine to the beginning of Western civilization. The precursory forms of highbrow, lowbrow, and even nobrow discourse, as we quickly find out, run from Socrates to Cervantes. Moving from potato-nosed philosophers of the agora to the high-minded Don Quixote and his lowbrow sidekick Sancho Panza, we find not only constant schisms between the upper crust and the masses but also constant traffic between them as well.
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Notes
- 1.
Cervantes, 1605, chapter 32, fo. 179v.
- 2.
Swirski, see Chapter 3 in this collection.
- 3.
Dodds, 1973, p. 48.
- 4.
Plato, 1975, 504d, p. 459. Quote in following paragraph ibid.
- 5.
Plato, 1975, 503a, p. 453.
- 6.
Aristotle, 1941, 1377b–1378a, pp. 1379–1380.
- 7.
Cicero, 1976–1977, III 76, pp. 61–63; “gift of divinity” from Cicero, 1976, I 202, p. 141.
- 8.
Cicero, 1976–1977, II 157, p. 313.
- 9.
- 10.
Of the works discussed above, Aristotle’s rhetoric was translated into Latin from Arabic in the thirteenth century, but with the exception of Plato’s Timaeus none of the Socratic writings were known in the Middle Ages. The Rhetorica ad Herennium, falsely attributed to Cicero, was popular, but Cicero’s theoretical work “became a major influence only in the fifteenth century” (Murphy, 1981, p. 109).
- 11.
Kennedy, 1994, p. 258.
- 12.
Pelikan, 1993, p. 175.
- 13.
Kennedy, 1994, p. 258.
- 14.
Kennedy, 1983, pp. 180–181.
- 15.
Shuger, 1988, p. 48.
- 16.
Augustine, 2016, Book IV, ch. 18.35.
- 17.
Augustine, 2016, Book IV, ch. 2.3.
- 18.
Augustine, 2016, Book IV, ch. 10.24.
- 19.
Augustine, 2016, Book IV, ch. 27.59.
- 20.
Shuger, 1988, p. 76.
- 21.
Houston, 2002 passim and UNESCO, 2014.
- 22.
Proceedings, 1912, Part 1: 31 May 1658–18 November 1664, Esopus-Wildwyck.
- 23.
Bembo, 1525, fo. 13r–v.
- 24.
Bembo, 1525, fo. 17v, author’s emphasis.
- 25.
Bembo, 1525, fo. 18r.
- 26.
Bembo, 1991, p. 8.
- 27.
Du Bellay, 1549, Part I, ch. II, fo. 5v.
- 28.
Du Bellay, 1549, Part I, ch X, fo. 16v–17v.
- 29.
Du Bellay, 1549, Part I, ch. X, fo. 18r.
- 30.
Du Bellay, 1549, Part I, ch. IV, fo. 8v and ch. III, fo. 7v.
- 31.
Du Bellay, 1549, Part II, ch. II, fo. 24r and ch. IV, fo. 28r.
- 32.
Valdés, 1969, pp. 44–46 and 48.
- 33.
Erasmus’s book went through a then-record 27 editions in his lifetime.
- 34.
- 35.
Valdés, 1969, p. 154.
- 36.
Bembo, 1991, Part II, p. 8.
- 37.
Valdés, 1969, pp. 121 and 123.
- 38.
Valdés, 1969, pp. 122 and 126.
- 39.
Lope, 1609, title page. In early modern Spain, “comedias” meant plays of all kinds, including comedies, tragicomedies, histories, etc.; the “teatro” was the place you went to see a “comedia.”
- 40.
Lope, 1609, fo. 200b–201v.
- 41.
Lope, 1609, fo. 200b–201v.
- 42.
Falstaff and Lear in Shakespeare’s Henry V and King Lear, Clarín and Basilio in Calderón de la Barca’s La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream).
- 43.
Krabbenhoft, 2014, p. 160, and 2000, pp. 216–231.
- 44.
- 45.
Madariaga, 1926, passim.
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Krabbenhoft, K. (2017). Prequels to Nobrow. In: Swirski, P., Vanhanen, T. (eds) When Highbrow Meets Lowbrow. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95168-0_5
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