Research Catalog

Title

The journey to wisdom : self-education in patristic and medieval literature / Paul A. Olson.

Author

Olson, Paul A.

Publication

Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, ©1995.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xx, 297 pages; 24 cm

Summary

The Journey to Wisdom addresses a broad array of topics in education, the natural world, and medieval intellectual history. The book examines a philosophy of education that originated with the ancient Greeks and that reached its culmination in the late-medieval and early-Renaissance periods. That philosophy of education promotes a journey to wisdom, involving an escape from pure subjectivity and "the seductions of rhetoric" and leading to a profound awareness of the natural world and "nature's God." It grants us a renewed sense of education as a self-directed, transforming journey to knowledge and insight - rather than (as is so often the case now) as an impersonal, bureaucratized trek that reflects little sense of the ultimate aims of education. The Journey of Wisdom will be essential reading for students of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance intellectual history. But in its unmistakably modern concerns about education, the book also speaks to a far wider spectrum of readers.

Subject

• Education, Medieval
• Self-culture
• Education > Social aspects
• Literature, Medieval > History and criticism
• Comparative education
• Comparative education
• Education, Medieval
• Education > Social aspects
• Literature, Medieval
• Self-culture
• Zelfontwikkeling
• Wijsheid
• Onderwijs
• Literature, Medieval > History and criticism

Genre/Form

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. [217]-289) and index.

Contents

The journey through the natural world -- The journey to Sophia: Plato's Sophists and forms of education -- Philosophy, the creation, and learning: Gregory Thaumaturgos and origen -- Augustine's Confessions: naming, education, and empire -- Reading the Confessions: Boethius, Aelred, Dante, and Petrarch -- The heroic educational journey: virgil and medieval epic subcreation -- Boethius's return to Plato and wisdom -- Boethius's wisdom and Dante's architectonics of desire -- Plato revisited: the Florentine Platonists and the astronomers -- Fables for our time.

ISBN

• 0803235623
• 9780803235625

LCCN

95003042

OCLC

• ocm31865717
• 31865717
• SCSB-8893694

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library