Remerciez-le!

Remerciez @Admin pour avoir partagé cet document gratuitement, de la manière la plus simple, en partageant sur les réseaux sociaux.

chapter 6 Emithologia Etymology’s Riddles from 1500 to 1700 the practice of ety

chapter 6 Emithologia Etymology’s Riddles from 1500 to 1700 the practice of etymologizing underwent subtle, con- tinual changes towards the end of the Middle Ages and throughout the period commonly known as the Renaissance. It may be true, as some have argued, that such changes were more in emphasis than in content and that “the new was bound to the old by ultimate faith in the power of etymology.”1 But, in the large-scale rearrangement of the semiotic landscape that charted the gradual collapse of medieval culture, the fact that etymologizing came to be conceived more and more as matter of technique seems highly consequential.2 Some hu- 116 1. Frank Borchardt, “Etymology in Tradition and in the Northern Renaissance,” Journal of the History of Ideas 29, no. 3 (1968), 416. Notable late medieval examples of the etymegoriz- ing mode may be found in Giovanni Boccaccio’s shaky etymologies in Filostrato (the title it- self erroneously etymologized as “the man vanquished and struck down by love”) and Filocolo. Perhaps the most notorious instance comes from Boccaccio’s Genealogie deorum gentilium libri, ed. Vincenzo Romano (Bari: Laterza, 1951), I, 1, 13–15), where the ancient deity, Demogorgon, is presented as the founder of a whole progeny of gods by way of a faulty derivation, conflat- ing Latin daemon (demon) and Greek demos (people). For a discussion of this “grammatical er- ror, become god” see Jean Seznec’s The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and Its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art, trans. Barbara F. Sessions (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), especially pages 220 and following. In most cases, late medieval and early Renaissance etymologizing follows the patterns of Isidore or Balbus, as in the case of la- borinthus, fancifully derived from the “labour” of “entering” a maze. As Thomson notes, Chau- cer may have had this etymology in mind. N. S. Thomson, Chaucer, Boccaccio and the Debate of Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 24. On the close interaction between mythography, rhetoric, and grammar see Jane Chance’s Medieval Mythography, vol. 1 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994). 2. From a semiotic viewpoint, the Renaissance may be generally said to mark a process of a “syntagmatization,” whereby language is exhausted on the level of the “signifier,” along word chains (syntagms), rather than explored as a paradigmatic pointer to transcendence. This ironically precipitates the rationalistic turn of the seventeenth century when we witness, in Bottiroli’s words, a broader “war waged by literalism against figuralism” of the kind exten- sively explored by Michel Foucault. Bottiroli, Jacques Lacan, 169. See Michel Foucault, The Order Del, Bello, Davide. Forgotten Paths : Etymology and the Allegorical Mindset, Catholic University of America Press, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/brown/detail.action?docID=3134784. Created from brown on 2019-11-13 08:50:45. Copyright © 2007. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved. manists invested rhetoric and etymology with unprecedented pres- tige, but while they kept the medieval curriculum of studia humanitatis alive around the core disciplines of trivium and quadrivium, their rig- orous efforts were directed to poring over texts in their original sourc- es, which must imply some acceptance of the very formalistic logic they had set out to discard.3 Of course, humanism resists sweeping generalizations. Charles Trinkhaus reminds us that “Plato and Aristo- tle were not at odds in humanist ideals” and that we should declare a truce between the two. He thinks “we forget that the humanists were in many cases readers if not hearers of rhetoric and famous as critics and interpreters of texts. They viewed the rhetorical relationship cer- tainly as much from the viewpoint of the recipient as of the deliverer, both in their actuality as living citizens and theoretically as critics and analyzers of eloquence.”4 Also, humanism looks somewhat suspended between medieval scholasticism and modern science. Nancy Struever gives an indication of this when she says that Lorenzo Valla’s discursive practice was “no longer bound by the communicative and role conventions of the me- dieval university with its formalized disputations, theological institu- tions of docere; but its teaching roles and communicative modes do not yet possess the professional resonances of early modernity; the peda- ETYMOLOGY’S RIDDLES, 1500–1700 117 of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2002). See also Juri Lotman, Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, trans. A. Shukman (Bloomington: Indiana Uni- versity Press, 1990); and Juri Lotman, “On the Metalanguage of a Typological Description of Culture,” Semiotica 3 (1975), 101–25. 3. Etymology’s technicalization during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries is discussed at length by Paul Zumthor in Langue, texte, énigme (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975). See especially pages 150–53, where he gives an account of the restriction in meaning that “et- ymologia” had faced ever since medieval scholasticism. I would call this “syntagmatization,” because it tended to exhaust research in the chain of words (syntagms) rather than to see lan- guage as an extrasystemic pointer (paradigms). In her essay on “Effort and Achievement in 17th Century British Linguistics,” Vivian Salmon talks about a “movement towards concen- tration on ‘etymology’ in the sense of word-formation.” Vivian Salmon, Language and Society in Early Modern England: Selected Essays 1981–1994 (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1996), 19. 4. Charles Trinkhaus, “The Question of Truth in Renaissance Rhetoric and Anthropol- ogy,” in James J. Murphy, ed., Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 209. Del, Bello, Davide. Forgotten Paths : Etymology and the Allegorical Mindset, Catholic University of America Press, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/brown/detail.action?docID=3134784. Created from brown on 2019-11-13 08:50:45. Copyright © 2007. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved. gogic and research institutions described in Ramism, Protestant scho- lasticism, Jesuit reform, encyclopedism, are not yet in place.”5 Etymologizing in the Renaissance was popular. Yet, in the wake of philology, etymology’s (and rhetoric’s) scopes would be progressively restricted: their resources curtailed, their aims secularized, and their results for the most part divested of heuristic value. According to Paul Zumthor, already by the fourteenth century the term etymology applied almost exclusively to the technical field of grammar.6 And although technicism had always been, as we saw, a part of etymological inquiry, starting with the thirteenth-century Aristotelian modistae, it had turned into a subtle reaction against allegorical etymologies in Greek and Lat- in poetry and against the medieval formula spiritalis intelligentiae of Euch- erius of Lyons and Isidore of Seville. Renaissance technicism developed the exhilarating notion “that words are in some way autonomous and constitute a ‘word-world,’”7 to be quite legitimately explored without special provisions for political rhetoric, philosophy, or metaphysics. At the same time, paradoxically, this keen awareness of the tech- nical workings of language—of the potential for unrestrained ma- nipulation—provided fuel for new, acrobatic feats in the heavily allegorized and secretive realms of hermeneutics and divination, Neo- platonic practices which technique and method were expected to en- hance.8 Thus, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Western etymolo- 5. Nancy Struever, “Vico, Valla, and the Logic of Humanistic Inquiry,” in Giambattista Vi- co’s Science of Humanity, ed. Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Donald Philip Verene, 173–85 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 83. See also Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1986). 6. Zumthor, Langue, texte, énigme, 153–55. The years between 1550 and 1650 marked the definitive shift of etymology to the Renaissance technical use. As far as allegory is concerned, see Don Cameron Allen’s thorough discussion of the process he describes as the “rationaliza- tion of myth and the end of allegory” in Renaissance culture. Don Cameron Allen, Mysteriously Meant: The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 309ff. 7. Although wordplay is common enough in medieval literature, the idea that “words are in some way autonomous and constitute a ‘word-world’ was a Renaissance discovery.” K. Ruthven, “The Poet as Etymologist,” Critical Quarterly (1978), 11. 8. See Allen, Mysteriously Meant, and also Heinrich Plett’s recent Rhetoric and Renaissance Culture (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004). 118 ETYMOLOGY’S RIDDLES, 1500–1700 Del, Bello, Davide. Forgotten Paths : Etymology and the Allegorical Mindset, Catholic University of America Press, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/brown/detail.action?docID=3134784. Created from brown on 2019-11-13 08:50:45. Copyright © 2007. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved. gizing is found to straddle incipient science and ancient magic, and its elaborate word histories come to us, intertwined, from philological commentaries and scientific textbooks, from the guarded language of hermetic tomes and the hazy formulas of alchemical manuals.9 We are left with a puzzling tangle that even experts of Renaissance language theory are admittedly ill equipped to unravel.10 My purpose here must be simply to get a general sense of how allegory and etymology fared during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, by looking at how they were defined in English rhetoric manuals.11 I zero in on this very limited area of Renaissance studies following a suggestion from Brian Vickers, who maintains that “the English Renaissance both domesticated and energized uploads/Litterature/ del-bello-forgotten-paths-etymology-and-the-allegorical-mind-chapter-6-emithologia-etymology-x27-s-riddles-from-1500-to-1700.pdf