This interdisciplinary volume takes as its subject the multi-faceted
genre of didactic literature (the literature of instruction) which
constituted the cornerstone of literary enterprise and social control in
medieval and early modern Europe. Following an Introduction that raises
questions of didactic meaning, intent, audience, and social effect,
nineteen chapters deal with the construction of the individual didactic
voice and persona in the premodern period, didactic literature for
children, women as the creators, objects, and consumers of didactic
literature, the influence of advice literature on adult literacy, piety,
and heresy, and the revision of classical didactic forms and motifs in
the early modern period. Attention is paid throughout to the
continuities of didactic literature across the medieval and early modern
periods-its intertextuality, reliance on tradition, and self-renewal-and
to questions of gender, authority, control, and the socially constructed
nature of advice. Contributors particularly explore the intersection of
advice literature with real lives, considering the social impact of both
individual texts and the didactic genre as a whole. The volume deals
with a wide variety of texts from the early Middle Ages to the
eighteenth century, written in languages from Latin through the European
vernaculars to Byzantine Greek and Russian, offering a comprehensive
overview of this pervasive and influential genre.
