AMS presents, Matthew Edholm “Old voices saying new things: Re-writing classical literature at the monastery of Fulda in the mid-ninth century”
E51-275 134 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, United StatesPresented by Matthew Edholm, Visiting Fellow at the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts Abstract: This paper examines the way in which two authors of the mid-ninth century, Rudolf of Fulda and Brun Candidus, used classical Roman sources silently within their own work. Rudolf silently quotes from Tacitus’s Germania and elsewhere from Vitruvius’s De architectura; while Brun often adopts phrases and half-lines culled primarily from the poetry of Virgil and Ovid and stitches them into his own lines in his Metrical Life of Eigil (Vita Aeigilis). I will argue that both Rudolf and Brun receive and re-shape past Roman writers in order to make them re-signify and speak toward Christian purposes relevant to the monastery of Fulda. Furthermore, the paper will situate this practice of re-writing past authors within the context of Late Antique art and poetic aesthetics in order to demonstrate the origin of the style, as well as that style’s application to Carolingian reliquaries and material artefacts. In this way it will map out a Carolingian aesthetic of refashioning the past to serve the needs of the (medieval) present. Bio: After serving three years in the army, I completed a Bachelor’s degree in Humanities from Lee University. After this I received an MLitt with […]
