for the sake of blogging
Well, my lack of posts is not because I am away (as was the case last time), rather I am so busy. But it's a good busy. I think I'm getting closer to a paper topic, so I've been reading a lot, in addition to regular class preparation. I'm trying to narrow down a pursuable topic dealing with some of the glosses to Boethius's De institutione musica, so getting into Boethius's works and their interrelatedeness, as well as medieval interpretations of his some of theoretical and aesthetics views on music is all very interesting. The Latin in De...musica is quite manageable, too, which is nice for me, since we all know that medieval Latin is my most recent bane.
Also recently brought in my medieval music survey was something that I had not known and find absolutely fascinating. Some writers in the Middle Ages employed a technique in their prose writing called the cursus, which basically is the ending of a sentence or clause. Only used in highly stylistic contexts the cursus is a way of ending the sentence in a metrically regular way (like poetry, only it's prose). Different kinds of cursi(?) would have different arrangements of patterns of accents. For instance, one might choose to end the last six syllables of the sentence: strong (or accented), weak, weak, strong, weak, weak. Wow! talk about having to choose your words carefully! And where is the line between poetry and prose?