We found a match
Your institution may have rights to this item. Sign in to continue.
- Title
Necessary Abuse: The Mirror as Metaphor in the Sixteenth Century.
- Authors
Smith, Jenny
- Abstract
Metaphor, or translatio, is one of the most prominent figures in classical and medieval rhetoric, and the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries inherited both a sense of its importance, and a complex admixture of attitudes about its cognitive and linguistic functions. This was enabled by the teaching of imitatio (μίμησις), 'the study and conspicuous deployment of features recognizably characteristic of a canonical author's style or conten…', which emphasised intimate knowledge of as large as possible a library of texts. 1 The close analysis involved necessitated memorising and internalising a wide variety of authorial models, which makes Renaissance authors ideal for a historical examination of one of the key tenets of an influential modern theory: that metaphor is fundamental to cognition. In this paper I survey some sixteenth-century uses as a metaphor of the mirror for counsel, against the background of Lakoff and Johnson's 'invariance principle.
- Subjects
METAPHOR; LINGUISTICS; CANONICAL transformations; COGNITIVE ability; PRINCIPLE of relativity (Physics)
- Publication
Ceræ: An Australasian Journal of Medieval & Early Modern Studies, 2017, Vol 4, p1
- ISSN
2204-146X
- Publication type
Article