A01=John C. Leeds
Accusative
Accusative Subject
Author_John C. Leeds
Category=DS
ciceronian
Ciceronian Humanism
Ciceronian Prose
Civil Society
Corpus Mysticum
david
De Origine
Descending Thesis
durkan
early modern linguistics
Early Writings
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
formalism
Golden Latin
Grammatical Subject
grammatical subject analysis
Hector Boece
humanism
Italian Humanism
James III
Jan Pinborg
john
John Baliol
language ideology studies
Latin vernacular syntax comparison
loeb
Mair's Argument
Mair’s Argument
Malcolm Canmore
Material Referent
neo-Latin humanism
Passive Subject
prose
quint
Renaissance Humanism
Scotorum Historiae
Scottish historical narratives
Scottish Reformation
semiotic theory
vernacular
Vernacular Syntax
Vertical Dimension
Product details
- ISBN 9781138276024
- Weight: 453g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 28 Nov 2016
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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The relationship between Latin and the Scots vernacular in the chronicle literature of 16th-century Scotland provides the topic for this study. John Leeds here shows how the disposition of grammatical subjects, in the radically dissimilar syntactic systems of humanist neo-Latin and Scots, conditions the way in which "the subject" (i.e., the human individual) and its actions are conceived in the writing of history. In doing so, he extends the boundaries of existing critical literature on early modern "subjectivity" to include the subject of grammar, analyzing its incorporation into narrative sentences and illuminating the ideological contents of different systems for its deployment. Though focused on the chronicles of Renaissance Scotland, the argument can in principle be applied to the entire range of Latin-vernacular relations during the early modern period. While examining the intellectual culture of early modernity, Leeds also takes aim, at every stage of his argument, at the semiotic and social-constructionist orthodoxies that dominate the humanities today. Against the notion that human subjects are "discursive constructs," he argues for the subordination of discourse to realities, both material and immaterial, that are external to language. As part of this argument, he proposes a view of neo-Latin humanism as a resistance to the onset of modernity, arguing that Latin prose provides options (at once syntactic, ideological, and ontological) that vernacular culture has, to its considerable detriment, foreclosed. In sum, Leeds advocates a renewed and theoretically-informed commitment to the humanism that the humanities themselves have been at such pains, during the last scholarly generation, to depreciate.
John Leeds is Associate Professor of English at Florida Atlantic University, Davie Campus, USA.
