European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages by Ernst Robert Curtius

Author:Ernst Robert Curtius
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2013-10-15T16:00:00+00:00

L’ amor dell’ apparenza e il suo pensiero.

Ed ancor questo quassù si comporta

Con men disdegno che quando è posposta

La divina scrittura o quando è torta.

The word is set aside (posposta) by the degenerate avaricious clerks who read nothing but the Decretals until their margins are used up (Par., IX, 133 ff.). It is twisted (torta) by the theologians who interpret it as they please.

Now, to reading conceived as the form of reception and study, corresponds writing conceived as the form of production and creation. The two concepts belong together. In the intellectual world of the Middle Ages they represent as it were the two halves of a sphere. The unity of this world was shattered by the invention of printing. The immense and revolutionary change which it brought about can be summarized in one statement: Until that time, every book was a manuscript. Merely materially, then, as well as artistically, the written book had a value which we can no longer feel. Every book produced by copying represented diligence and skilled craftsmanship, long hours of intellectual concentration, loving and sedulous work. Every such book was a personal achievement—we find this expressed in the colophon, in which the scribe often tells us his name and unburdens his heart: “Sicut aegrotus desiderat sanitatem, item desiderat scriptor finem libri.”

“Tell me, O Muse, of the man,” “Sing, goddess, the wrath,” “Arms and the man I sing”—so the epics of Antiquity begin. In Dante the Muses are invoked too, but immediately afterward the poet also invokes his own mind, and, instead of telling and singing, we find writing (Inf., II, 7 ff.):

O Muse, o alto ingegno, or m’ aiutate.

O mente che scrivesti ciò ch’ io vidi,

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