Friday 17th March 11:15—13:00, Session 2

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Overview of programme

Session:

Philosophy and Theology

Place:

Seminarraum 2

Moderator:

Jan Odstrčilík

Paper 1:

Philosophy, Polemics and Translation in the English Wycliffite Sermons

Kantik Ghosh

Paper 2:

Fifteenth-Century Vernacular Wycliffite Politics – The Czech Medieval Translation of John Wyclif’s Dialogus

Martin Dekarli

Paper 3:

Bringing the West to the East: Crossing Cultural Frontiers in Demetrios Kydones’s Greek Translation of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, Prima Pars

Christopher Wright

Presentation of ERC Consolidator Grant:

Reassessing Ninth Century Philosophy. A Synchronic Approach to the Logical Traditions

Christophe Erismann

Philosophy, Polemics and Translation in the English Wycliffite Sermons

Kantik Ghosh

The followers of John Wyclif, famous 14th-century Oxford theologian and ‘heretic’, produced a range of authoritative texts in both Latin and English, in the form of sermons, polemics, exegesis and biblical translation and scholarship. This paper will look at the set of 294 sermons in English (edited by Anne Hudson and Pamela Gradon as the English Wycliffite Sermons) which draw on a range of learned and other sources including Wyclif’s own Latin Sermones, mostly compiled in his last years when exiled from Oxford at Lutterworth. The relationship of the vernacular sermons to Wyclif’s Latin ones (which are often of rebarbative philosophical complexity) is complex and raises important questions regarding genre, intended use and readership and the problems inherent in doing philosophical theology in the vernacular. They also ask us to reconsider the facile assumption that learned vernacular Wycliffite writings were necessarily addressed to a laity without access to Latin; indeed, it is beginning to appear that a great part of such productions may have been intended for a clerical readership with full access to Latin. The Wycliffite sermons are a peculiarly elusive group of texts, despite their very substantial length; and they offer contradictory and ambiguous insights into the transmission and consumption of learned and quasi-learned writings in the vernacular in later medieval England. This paper will attempt to elucidate some aspects of the role -- practical as well as conceptual – that ‘translation’ played in these controversial processes.

Fifteenth-Century Vernacular Wycliffite Politics – The Czech Medieval Translation of John Wyclif’s Dialogus

Martin Dekarli

Recent historiographical narrative considers John Wyclif’s (d. 1384) canon of works as one of the most important stimuli for the development of the Prague reform discourse during the late middle ages. After 1385, many treatises of the Doctor Evangelicus received great acclaim and were widely diffused in late medieval Bohemia. Since 1407, thanks to the Hussite-Lollard courier enterprise, several tracts belonging to Wyclif’s Summa theologiae, along with some of his other polemical works, deeply influenced a number of Bohemian masters. Within the milieu of Prague University, it is considered that Wyclif’s political theology had its strongest influence on Jan Hus (d. 1415).

Wyclif’s treatises induced a series of controversies, e. g. the most important ‘Reform Programme’ debate from the years 1413 and 1414 between the Bohemian Wycliffites, led by Jan Hus and Catholic theologians, respectively gathered around Štěpán of Palecz (d. 1423) and Stanislav of Znojmo (d. 1414). However, from 1400/1401, we can trace the significant influence of Wyclif’s other late, but popular, works – such as Trialogus and Dialogus – within the local Prague reformist discourse as well as some Bohemian masters’ attempts at vernacular translations of these texts. The aim of the proposed lecture is to provide up-to-date information on Czech medieval vernacular translations of Wyclif’s works – especially on the Dialogus today ascribed to Jakoubek of Stříbro (d. 1429).

Bringing the West to the East: Crossing Cultural Frontiers in Demetrios Kydones’s Greek Translation of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, Prima Pars

Christopher Wright

The Greek translation of the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas produced by the Byzantine scholar and politician Demetrios Kydones in the 1350s was a formative contribution to the unprecedented engagement with the Latin Scholastic tradition that took place in Byzantium in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Kydones’s intentions in producing his translations of the major theological works of Aquinas reflected his respect for the intellectual accomplishments of the Latin West, and his sympathies for the Catholic position in the ongoing religious schism, which led to his own conversion. As such, the translation project was a conscious and ambitious bid to bridge the greatest divide in the Christian world, impinging both on the sphere of religion and that of scholarly culture. It involved transplanting texts not only across the language barrier but between intellectual milieux characterised by very different attitudes and methods, and into a hostile ideological climate. Within this wider enterprise, the Prima Pars of the Summa Theologiae offers special insights into the translation process, because it survives both in Kydones’s autograph working manuscript and in an early copy containing extensive autograph revisions, enabling multiple stages in the translator’s refinement of his work to be traced. This part of the text is also of particular significance for its content, since it contains the sections dealing with many of the questions on which Aquinas’s arguments would be most controversial in the context of Byzantine theological debate. These included not only the key doctrinal questions in dispute between East and West, but also the matters at issue in the Hesychast controversy within the Orthodox Church over the theories of Gregory Palamas, another area in which Kydones was at odds with the dominant consensus in Byzantium. In the way in which he presented a text which he hoped would influence his compatriots through both its content and its form, Kydones seems to have been guided both by his enthusiasm for its message and by caution as to its likely reception. Underlying his conscious concern with the ideological boundaries being crossed by his translation, its form also bears the marks of crossing boundaries which may been less obvious to Kydones, in its transposition from the environment of Latin Scholasticism, with its highly technical textual machinery, into a Byzantine literary world with a somewhat different frame of reference and a stronger concern with aesthetics. This shift is manifested in aspects of translation practice including word selection, punctuation and the citation of authorities, a systematic accumulation of choices with significant cumulative effects. On the basis of examination of the manuscripts produced and amended by the translator, this paper will illuminate the ways in which this text was reshaped in its transmission across the divide between East and West that he sought to help reconcile.