Purposes
Such poems may simply have been recorded or read for entertainment, or to convey a moral or religious lesson. The Owl and the Nightingale includes extended dialogues on rhetorical skills and has been seen as an instruction in (or possibly a parody of) the teaching of rhetorical technique. For example, both employ the medieval rhetorical tools of appealing to authority (by quoting Alfred the Great) and by attempting to goad the opponent into anger and then a mistake (stultiloquiem). During the eighth and ninth centuries, it was customary for students to debate their masters in schools and universities, and debates in litigation were likewise becoming more popular. These situations – which increased the relevance of the genre – were sometimes alluded to or parodied in debate poems.
The fiery debate in The Owl and the Nightingale is ended with a wren intervening, but critics have variously argued that either the owl or the nightingale is better at employing rhetorical strategy. One critic, Kathryn Hume (in Cartlidge, XIX), suggests that the poem is itself a moralistic warning against pointless quarreling.
Read more about this topic: Medieval Debate Poetry
Famous quotes containing the word purposes:
“So shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause,
And in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fallen on th’inventors’ heads.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)
“What happened at Hiroshima was not only that a scientific breakthrough ... had occurred and that a great part of the population of a city had been burned to death, but that the problem of the relation of the triumphs of modern science to the human purposes of man had been explicitly defined.”
—Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982)