No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
When Boethius, in his De topicis differentiis, translated the Greek word topos as locus, he opened to the Middle Ages the possibility of seeing a place as both a physical locale and an argumentative setting.1 That is to say, beyond geography there were at least two other dimensions of place that were sanctioned by the way the word itself was used. In rhetoric and dialectic, topoi were places where one discovered strategies of persuasion and demonstration. This sharing of terms between natural and humanistic sciences was less metaphorical than we might assume. Plato's Timaeus and Chalcidius's translation of it, as well as the fourth book of Aristotle's Physics, enabled medieval thinkers to equate place with primary matter and involve it in the process of creation and becoming. For Aristotle and Cicero, ways of debating were topics because arguments came into being the same way the universe was generated: by giving some primary matter a form. There was thus a profound linking of topography and inventio, a coupling that I shall argue affected the conduct of literary debates in fundamental ways. In poems like The Owl and the Nightingale and Winner and Waster, places become their own arguments. Pearl and the Divine Comedy, however, go one step further: in these poems, the locality of dialectic becomes a way for both poets to talk about poetry itself and the truth it conveys.
Loading…
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.