“Ekphrasis of the Constellations” in J. Metham’s romance Amoryus and Cleopes (15th century)
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: In this paper, the research material is a fragment of the chivalric romance Amoryus and Cleopes by John Metham, an English scientist and poet of the mid-15th century. The object of the study was Metham’s description of the constellations of the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, contained in the text and considered as ekphrasis. If the very perception of the firmament by the ancients represented ekphrasis of the first degree, in which individual heroes and parts of the plots of ancient myths as products of verbal art were projected onto the sky and visualized by assigning them to individual groups of stars, then the description of the indicated constellations by Metham’s romance narrator was a return from the visual image to the verbal one, therefore, an ekphrasis of the second degree. The main research methods were textual and intertextual analyses. The purpose of the study was to identify the features of the mentioned ekphrasis. As a result of inspecting a fragment of the romance, the following conclusions were made regarding the features of the constellations’ descriptions: the author of the opus focused on reproducing the information related to the mythological, rather than the mathematical component of astronomy, and therefore he did not refer to such famous astronomers-geometricians as Ptolemy and Hipparchus, and at the same time he was more interested in how the philosophers and poets of Antiquity perceived celestial phenomena; within the framework of the characteristic medieval overuse of rhetorical devices, especially such ones as amplification, which help to create the effect of learned, elevated style through loquacity, Metham frequently uses different names for the same constellations, and thus introduces allusions to different myths. The writer did not mechanically copy stereotypical mythological and astronomical information, but supplemented and developed it; his searches in the field of form in this case influenced the content of the fragment. Finally, the main identified feature was the desire to subordinate the “ekphrasis of the constellations” to the task of creating a unified astronomical-mythological system.
Author: Vadim B. Semyonov
Institution: Lomonosov Moscow State University
Language: English
Subfield: Classics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4410960801