Introduction: Criticism and Debates

Criticism in the Middle Ages meant, first and foremost, the examination and weighing of the validity of biblical commentary. This ranged from the criticism of manuscripts and texts to the discovery and elaboration of the “real” sense of a passage. Debate poetry's coalescence, scholars emphasize, attests to connections between ideas that might equally be understood as adversarial. The very precision with which we can identify modes of criticism ultimately tells us how imprecise a term “criticism” really is. Capgrave's Katherine appears to recognize that a long tradition of cultivated disputation, what we might now think of as formal debate, stands counter to those messy, haphazard, and sometimes violent incidents of casual quarrel. The chapter also presents an overview on the key concepts discussed in this book.