Skáldskaparmál: Snorri Sturluson's 'ars poetica' and medieval theories of language (review)

138 Reviews universal and unlimited but defacto abrogated and constrained by feudal law, the procuratorial responsibilities of emperors, and higher norms of ius naturale and ius divine. Baldus was an imperialist, but a practical one who also found ways to justify both the essence of the theory of papal sovereignty and the realities of papal power in fourteenth-century Italy. Noteworthily, he did not question either the authority or the genuineness of the Donation of Constantine. But his address to the issues of the two powers was balanced and within his thought there was much room for independence of imperial sovereignty from the Church. Ultimately, his thought was essentially dualist To me, the more interesting chapters of the book deal with Baldus' justification of the independent authority of republican city states through recourse to the defacto absence of the exercise of imperial authority and to the nature of government in the ius gentium, and also with the independent sovereignty and authority of monarchies and kings. The analysis of the legislative authority of these institutions is complex yet fascinating. The signorie are dealt with much more laconically, their authority being justified through imperial concession and welcomed, as a good Romanist would, as an index of the reappearance of imperial authority in Italy. Here the reference is to the Visconti dukes of Milan. Through it all w e are introduced to Baldus' contributions to the development of juridical thought on institutions such as corporation, legal persona, and the populus. One of the many positive achievements of Canning's book is its drawing of attention to the interpretation of medieval political thought through the mind of a man of the world, giving rise on many occasions to questioning of the degree of real applicability of many of the theories of both the political philosophers of the Middle Ages and their m o d e m interpreters. Canning's book belongs on the shelves of every university library and will be of interest to all students of the history of political thought. Highly recommended. John H. Pryor Department of History University of Sydney Clunies Ross, M., Skdldskaparmdl: Snorri Sturluson's 'ars poetica' and medieval theories of language, Odense, Odense U. P., 1987 (The Viking Collection, Vol. 4); pp. 210; R.R.P. ? In a recent publication entitled Edda: A collection of essays (University of Manitoba Press, 1983), only one of a dozen essays was concerned with Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda, the bulk of them discussing various aspects of the Elder or Poetic Edda. This is fairly typical of the relative interest and attention the two synonymous but internally so different works have attracted: one a Reviews 139 collection of mythological, heroic and didactic lays of uncertain origin and varying age, the other a treatise on the traditional, predominandy pre-Christian, poetry of the (West) Scandinavians by an educated and widely travelled Icelander of the early 13th century to w h o m w e also owe some of the best hisotricaiyfictional works of Old Norse; certainly the chronicle of Norwegian kings entided Heimskringla and possibly one of the great family sagas, Egils saga Skallagrimssonar. There has been a revival of interest in the Snorra Edda in recent years but mosdy in thefirstof the three main parts, the Gylfaginning, which has always been the most popular because of the wealth of mythological narratives it contains and because the question-and-answer framework in which they are embedded remains an imaginable reality there. In the 1980s two painstaking and richly annotated editions of Gylfaginning have appeared: Anthony Faulkes's English one in 1982 and Gottfried Lorenz's German one in 1984. The two latter parts of the book, where the material is predominantly taken from Scaldic rather than Eddic peotry, Skdldskaparmdl and Hdttatal (a descriptive survey of metrics), have remained comparatively neglected, and Margaret Clunies Ross's thorough and systematic study of Skdldskaparmdl , to which she earlier contributed in article form, is all the more welcome. Snorri Sturluson wrote two centuries after the conversion of Iceland to Christianity, by Act of Parliament so to say, in 1000, and it has always been a source of marvel not only how much of the pre-Christian poetic...