Meaning of speculum literature | Babel Free

Definitions

1. A medieval literary genre, popular from the 12th through the 16th centuries, inspired by the urge to encompass encyclopedic knowledge within a single work.
   uncountable
2. Alternative letter-case form of speculum literature.
   alt-of, uncountable

Examples

“Mirror or speculum literature, as Jourda and Cottrell have noted, can be traced back through medieval tradition to Augustinian, Biblical and Platonic sources.”

“However, insofar as these plays resemble statecraft or speculum''' literature, they also exhibit the rhetorical instability of statecraft discourse, in which antithesis fails to contain the tyrant. […] In “The Background and Sources of Preston’s Cambises,” English Studies 31 (1950): 129–35, and “The Authorship and Political Meaning of Cambises,” English Studies 36 (1955): 289–99, for example, W. A. Armstrong describes Cambyses as an example of speculum''' literature, in which the “naiveness” of characterization reflects the rhetoric of statecraft (p. 294).”

“As Anna Musso has pointed out, the adaptation of the genre to a female dedicatee places the text outside the normal run of speculum''' literature and identifies it with the rising literature in defence of women, which argued against their inferiority to men.”

“The sententious lessons of Lydgate’s great work contributed to the continent-wide development of a sub-genre of speculum''' literature: ‘advice to princes’.”

“The Speculum humanae salvationis, or ‘Mirror of human salvation’, is an anonymous composition, originally written in Latin, in rhyming verse, sometime between 1309 (as a reference to the Avignon papacy indicates) and 1324 (the date on two copies) as part of the genre of encyclopedic speculum literature.”

“Berges’s view (p. 343) that this work stands outside the tradition of Speculum''' literature can only be valid for the mirrors preceding it; […]”

“His remarks on the medieval tradition of Speculum''' literature, into which he places the Roman, are, of course, intended to be suggestive rather than comprehensive; […]”

“The saint king’s biographies, compiled in the court, and the Hungarian royal chronicle, compiled in different segments at different times, could both be classified as a form of Speculum''' literature.”

CEFR level