You Will Stay Alone in the Woods : 'Crisis of Interpretation' and the Origin of 'Christian Text' in the Latin Literature between the 250's and the 370's. Part I
Abstract
The two-part article focuses on the way the concept of text in the Latin culture changed in the course of the 4th century CE. During that process, the term textus gained a fixed meaning, approximately matching the one that later found its place in modern languages.
This first part of the article uses the 'Crisis of Interpretation' concept created by Michel Jeanneret for the 16th century humanist literature, demonstrating the change of the concept of text in Late Antiquity on two innovative Christian poetic texts from the 320's and the 360's: Proba's biblical Cento, and Optatian' collection of figural poems. Both authors typically worked with a special kind of 'targeted polysemy' inspired by their belief in the unity of the text and its meaning.