speculum literature
speculum literature noun: a medieval literary genre, popular from the 12th through the 16th centuries, inspired by the urge to encompass encyclopedic knowledge within a single work.
Noun (1)
speculum literature or (rare) speculum literature (uncountable)
- A medieval literary genre, popular from the 12th through the 16th centuries, inspired by the urge to encompass encyclopedic knowledge within a single work.
- Mirror or speculum literature, as Jourda and Cottrell have noted, can be traced back through medieval tradition to Augustinian, Biblical and Platonic sources.1989, Paula Sommers, “Le Miroir: Biblical Ascent”, in Celestial Ladders: Readings in Marguerite de Navarre’s Poetry of Spiritual Ascent, Geneva: Librairie Droz S.A., →ISBN, page 50
- However, insofar as these plays resemble statecraft or speculum literature, they also exhibit the rhetorical instability of statecraft discourse, in which antithesis fails to contain the tyrant. […] In “The Background and Sources of Preston’s Cambises,” English Studies 31 (1950): 129–35, and “The...1990, Rebecca W[eld] Bushnell, “Tyrannical Vices: Morality Plays and Humanist Drama”, in Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the English Renaissance, Ithaca, N.Y.; London: Cornell...
- Synonyms:
- mirror literature
Noun (2) capitalized: Speculum literature
Speculum literature (uncountable)
- Alternative letter-case form of speculum literature.
- Berges’s view (p. 343) that this work stands outside the tradition of Speculum literature can only be valid for the mirrors preceding it; […]1982, Herbert Grabes, “A typology of works bearing mirror-titles”, in The Mutable Glass: Mirror-Imagery in Titles and Texts of the Middle Ages and English Renaissance, Cambridge, Cambs: Cambridge...
- His remarks on the medieval tradition of Speculum literature, into which he places the Roman, are, of course, intended to be suggestive rather than comprehensive; […]1986, John V[incent] Fleming, “Garden of the Roman de la Rose: Vision of Landscape or Landscape of Vision?”, in Elisabeth Blair MacDougall, editor, Medieval Gardens, Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks...
Examples of speculum literature in a sentence
- Armstrong describes Cambyses as an example of speculum literature, in which the “naiveness” of characterization reflects the rhetoric of statecraft (p. 294).1990, Rebecca W[eld] Bushnell, “Tyrannical Vices: Morality Plays and Humanist Drama”, in Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and...
- The sententious lessons of Lydgate’s great work contributed to the continent-wide development of a sub-genre of speculum literature: ‘advice to princes’.2016, Rory Loughnane, “The Medieval Inheritance”, in Michael Neill, David Schalkwyk, editors, The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy...
Synonyms of speculum literature
Forms of speculum literature
| alternative form | Speculum literature |
|---|---|
| alternative form | speculum-literature |
Origin of speculum literature
From Latin speculum (“mirror”) in the title of these works.
Questions about speculum literature
- What does speculum literature mean?
- Speculum literature means a medieval literary genre, popular from the 12th through the 16th centuries, inspired by the urge to encompass encyclopedic knowledge within a single work.
- How do you use speculum literature in a sentence?
- Armstrong describes Cambyses as an example of speculum literature, in which the “naiveness” of characterization reflects the rhetoric of statecraft (p. 294).
- What part of speech is speculum literature?
- Speculum literature is a noun.
Words near speculum literature in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: speculum literature (page history and authors); Speculum literature (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this entry: “speculum literature.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/speculum_literature. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.