Dictionary

speculum literature en · NOUN

Etymology

From Latin speculum (“mirror”) in the title of these works.

Meanings

1. (rare, uncountable) A medieval literary genre, popular from the 12th through the 16th centuries, inspired by the urge to encompass encyclopedic knowledge within a single work.
   • However, insofar as these plays resemble statecraft or speculum''' literature, they also exhibit the rhetorical instability of statecraft discourse, in which antithesis fails to contain the tyrant. […] In “The Background and Sources of Preston’s Cambises,” English Studies 31 (1950): 129–35, and “The Authorship and Political Meaning of Cambises,” English Studies 36 (1955): 289–99, for example, W. A. Armstrong describes Cambyses as an example of speculum''' literature, in which the “naiveness” of characterization reflects the rhetoric of statecraft (p. 294). 1990, Rebecca W[eld] Bushnell, “Tyrannical Vices: Morality Plays and Humanist Drama”, in Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the English Renaissance, Ithaca, N.Y.; London: Cornell University Press, →ISBN, page 80:
   • Mirror or speculum literature, as Jourda and Cottrell have noted, can be traced back through medieval tradition to Augustinian, Biblical and Platonic sources. 1989, Paula Sommers, “Le Miroir: Biblical Ascent”, in Celestial Ladders: Readings in Marguerite de Navarre’s Poetry of Spiritual Ascent, Geneva: Librairie Droz S.A., →ISBN, page 50:
   • The sententious lessons of Lydgate’s great work contributed to the continent-wide development of a sub-genre of speculum''' literature: ‘advice to princes’. 2016, Rory Loughnane, “The Medieval Inheritance”, in Michael Neill, David Schalkwyk, editors, The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy, Oxford, Oxon: Oxford University Press, →ISBN, part I (Genre), page 39:
   • As Anna Musso has pointed out, the adaptation of the genre to a female dedicatee places the text outside the normal run of speculum''' literature and identifies it with the rising literature in defence of women, which argued against their inferiority to men. 2004, Stephen John Campbell, “Tanta amorosa impresa: Isabella, Perugino and Paride da Ceresara”, in The Cabinet of Eros: Renaissance Mythological Painting and the Studiolo of Isabella d’Este, New Haven, Conn.; London: Yale University Press, →ISBN, part II (The Paintings), page 184:
   • The Speculum humanae salvationis, or ‘Mirror of human salvation’, is an anonymous composition, originally written in Latin, in rhyming verse, sometime between 1309 (as a reference to the Avignon papacy indicates) and 1324 (the date on two copies) as part of the genre of encyclopedic speculum literature. 2022, “Introduction”, in An Illustrated Speculum Humanae Salvationis: Green Collection MS 000321, Leiden; Boston, Mass.: Brill, →ISBN, page 1:

Forms

Synonyms

mirror literature

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