Blake Gutt |
Blake Gutt is a final-year PhD student at King's College, Cambridge, UK, supervised by Professor Bill Burgwinkle. His doctoral thesis investigates conceptual networks, and the ways in which they underlie both text and its manuscript presentation across a range of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century French, Occitan and Catalan literary works. The project explores the resonances of twentieth- and twenty-first-century theorization of systems with medieval texts, which include saints’ lives, encyclopedic works, and texts featuring characters who can be read as transgender.
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‘trop era subtil a entendre’: Ramon Llull’s Art, from margin to centre |
The medieval Catalan philosopher, theologian and mystic Ramon Llull (1232-1316) began his career as an extremely marginal figure. However, he was convinced that his work deserved not merely a place in the centre, but to become the centre, the conceptual system through which all understanding would occur. Following a series of visions of the crucified Christ which dissuaded him from composing troubadour lyric, Llull had set out to write the best book in the world, a book which would apprise unbelievers of their errors. Later, in what he referred to as an illumination, Llull claimed to have received a new and perfect system of thought, direct from God. The proper application of this extremely complicated system of combinatory reasoning, known as the Art, would allow comprehension of all fields of knowledge, and of their relationship to divine truth. Llull therefore embarked upon a mission to centralize and universalize the most marginal of positions: the view from inside his own head. The author of over 260 texts expounding the Art, which he saw as the answer to everything, Llull complained that instead of learning from his works, readers tended to flee like cats across hot coals. This lack of enthusiasm from his prospective audience led to progressive simplification of the Art in an effort to catalyse engagement with the system. Endeavouring to make his work known, Llull crossed borders and oceans, as well as linguistic and religious barriers, and the boundaries between literary genres. This paper will consider Llull’s trajectory from the margins to the centre, and the ways in which he negotiated between these two apparently opposing positions, rewriting and reversing their significances. I will examine extracts from Llull’s texts which address his disappointment with his audience’s inability to understand his works, and question whether a liminal relationship to both margin and centre is in fact the only position which could ever satisfy a self-proclaimed bringer of ultimate truth. |