Paperback. 9" X 6". xvii, 339pp. Very mild shelf wear to covers, corners, and edges of paper wraps. Very occasional inked underlining to pages. Underlining does not obscure text. Binding is sound. ABOUT THIS BOOK: Early Christianity faced the problem of the human word versus Christ the Word. Could language accurately describe spiritual reality? The Mirror of Language brilliantly traces the development of one prominent theory of signs from Augustine through Anselm of Canterbury, Thomas Aquinas, and Dante. Their shared epistemology validated human language as an authentic but limited index of preexistent reality, both material and spiritual. This sign theory could thereby account for the ways men receive, know, and transmit religious knowledge, always mediated through faith. Marcia L. Colish demonstrates how the three theologians used different branches of the medieval trivium to express a common sign theory: Augustine stressed rhetoric, Anselm shifted to grammar (including grammatical proofs of God's existence), and Thomas Aquinas stressed dialectic. Dante, the one poet included in this study, used the Augustinian sign theory to develop a Christian poetics that culminates in the Divine Comedy. The author points out not only the commonality but also the sharp contrasts between these writers and shows the relation between their sign theories and the intellectual ferment of the times. When first published in 1968, The Mirror of Language was recognized as a pathfinding study. This completely revised edition incorporates the scholarship of the intervening years and reflects the refinements of the author's thought. Greater prominence is given to the role of Stoicism, and sharper attention is paid to some of the thinkers and movements surrounding the major thinkers treated. Concerns of semiotics, philosophy, and literary criticism are elucidated further. The original thesis, still controversial, is now even wider ranging and more salient to current intellectual debate.(Publisher).

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Bibliographic Details

Title

The Mirror of Language: A Study in the Medieval Theory of Knowledge

Publisher

University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln

Publication Date

1983

Binding

Paperback

Condition

Good +

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Underground Books, ABAA is an online rare and antiquarian bookshop as well as a brick and mortar general bookstore of the same name in downtown Carrollton, Georgia. Sister store Hills & Hamlets Bookshop is located in the nearby planned eco-community of Serenbe. Co-owners Josh Niesse and Megan Bell met in 2011, just 10 days or so after Josh opened the doors of Underground Books, literally underground, several steps below street level in a 100-year-old basement in our historic downtown. Megan, an English student at the University of West Georgia, walked in, fell down the rabbit hole, and never left! Reader, we married in May of 2014, under the book arch that now resides at the bookshop. We are both proud alumni of the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar (CABS), and Megan additionally of Rare Book School at the University of Virginia and of the ABAA Women?s Initiative Mentorship Program. We have two open bookshops that carry new, used, bargain, rare, and antiquarian books, as well as our online office, impossible without our incredible team of booksellers, including two fellow CABS graduates, Miranda McMillan and Suzanne Carnes. Like many booksellers with open brick-and-mortar stores, we are passionate generalists, but our specialties are in decorative publisher's cloth bindings; fairy tales, folklore, and mythology; popular science and natural history; the occult; and fine press books.

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