Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 The Exemplum and the Legal Case
- 2 Asking Legal Questions in Gower's Confessio Amantis
- 3 The King in his Empire Reigns Supreme
- 4 Kingship and Law in Gower's Mirror for Princes
- 5 Desiring Closure: Gower and Retributive Justice
- Conclusion: The Trials of Exemplary Legal Fiction
- Bibliography
- Intex
1 - The Exemplum and the Legal Case
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 The Exemplum and the Legal Case
- 2 Asking Legal Questions in Gower's Confessio Amantis
- 3 The King in his Empire Reigns Supreme
- 4 Kingship and Law in Gower's Mirror for Princes
- 5 Desiring Closure: Gower and Retributive Justice
- Conclusion: The Trials of Exemplary Legal Fiction
- Bibliography
- Intex
Summary
Jacques Derrida, in his essay “The Law of Genre,” has fun with the assumption that there could indeed be a law of genre. In a slightly facetious way, he questions whether genres can ever be free from contamination and impurity. Perhaps not surprisingly, Derrida embraces the counter-law that genres must always mix. In addition, the movement from exemplary individual text to the level of genre is never an easy one from species to genus, or from particular to general. This is why Derrida concludes, “What is at stake, in effect, is exemplarity, and its whole enigma.”
Given that the problem of genre is also the problem of exemplarity, it seems poignant that the medieval exemplum as a genre has proven resistant to definition. Jean-Thiébaut Welter, at the outset of his monumental work L’Exemplum dans la Littérature Religieuse et Didactique du Moyen Age, writes, “Par le mot exemplum, on entendait, au sens large du terme, un récit ou une historiette, une fable ou une parabole, une moralité ou une description pouvant servir de preuve à l'appui d'un exposé doctrinal, religieux ou moral.” In this definition we can begin to see the proliferation of genres (the short story, the fable, the parable) that the exemplum can appropriate, all in the service of providing a didactic lesson. The exemplum can borrow material from saints' lives, from history, from natural science, and the list goes on. Given such generic fluidity, many critics prefer to define the genre in terms of function rather than form.
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- John Gower and the Limits of the Law , pp. 15 - 32Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2013