Historiography of Simile Research: The Middle Ages

Abstract

The article deals with the study of medieval concepts of simile in both Western and Eastern traditions. It highlights the transition from the classical fundamentals to their medieval interpretation in the European specialized literature, as well as rather independent research of this category outside Europe. The correlation of terminology of different epochs is established and the dependence of scientific thought on the historical stage of society development is outlined. The paper demonstrates that the explorations of ancient philosophers, logicians, orators, and writers determined the vectors of further research in which initial ideas were partially reconsidered in the Middle Ages. It is shown that in the early Middle Ages, almost all European research is conducted in Latin, and different types of simile are named by the transliterated Aristotelian terms “icon”, “parabola” and “paradigm”, the latter of which he himself never connected with the first two. All of them were thought to form the newly introduced concept of “homoeosis”, which actually corresponds to simile. In Western European works (at least in the Anglo-Saxon ones) simile acquires a sacred origin in the Middle Ages and becomes one of the profound methods of Christian enlightenment. It is perceived as one of the main ways in which God communicates with people. Medieval attempts to organize the figures of speech and tropes associated with figurativeness into a hierarchical paradigm, which were made in Western Europe and Kyiv Rus`, are generally characterized as quite successful and effective because at this stage the commonality of the essence of “icon” and “parabola” is recognized. The paper proves that since simile was seen as a rhetorical figure, the interest in it was limited to specific practical tasks related to the art of eloquence and, to a lesser extent, artistic style. The content, scope and hierarchy of terms for its designation vary depending on the authors of the books on rhetoric, reflecting the nuances of translation of ancient Greek and Latin texts, the development of linguistic thought, as well as deepening the analysis of ancient Greek and Roman studies. The difference in approaches to the study of simile is clearly noticeable at such an early stage: European (Western) tradition is more focused on the functional and semantic content of the phenomenon for both poetic and purely practical, as well as religious purposes, while the Eastern tradition focuses on structural variety of ways of poetry decoration. These two directions developed independently, and only one of them (the first one) became the foundation for the active study of simile in the Renaissance period.