rarely imaginable where Medieval Latin texts or translations are at stake. Medieval Latin played only a marginal role in the process: professionalization presupposes a profit motive that is. The translation of Medieval Latin into English has received only very short shrift. This article considers the fortunes of Medieval Latin literature in Modern English translation. Translation studies have generally burgeoned as a field of scholarly investigation in recent decades. In the dialogue between word and image, a number of approaches to the sensorial dimension of the literary experiences of art will be suggested, essentially in the Carolingian period, with a view to providing a more precise definition of what is understood by the term "ecphrasis". The first analyses, on a theoretical level, ecphrasis in the literary and theological reality of the Middle Ages the second looks at these theoretical realities put to the test of artistic objects. However, a reading of this abundant literature, more or less well-known, reveals that it is not so much the work of art itself which lies at the heart of that which is written, than the experience of art.
It may thus seem counterproductive to approach the sensorial dimension of medieval art through the prism of the text. Descriptions of works of art deal as much with the content of such works as with the appreciation of the notion of art itself. Ecphrasis, which is highly developed in Greek poetry, but considerably less in Latin texts, may be defined broadly (the developed description of an object, whatever its nature), and more precisely (an animated, imagistic description of a work of art, real or imagined). Literary descriptions of works of art should closely resemble the ecphrasis found in classical texts, Greek and Roman. More precisely, we endeavored to understand an apparently strange question that appeared in the faculties of arts in France and in Italy in the 14th century: to which category do intentions in the mind belong to? In Aristotelian terms: are they substances or accidents? The problem is the following: if they are accidents, how can they represent something else that an accident? If they are substances, what does it. Here, we decided to focus on the debates among the so-called “Latin Averroists”, because they clearly show that the medieval question on intentionality cannot be reduced to the well-known theory of intentional beings. Indeed, Brentano ascribes to some medieval philosophers the thesis according to which objects of thought have a special kind of being (they inexist intentionally in the mind) that explains how can our thoughts be about this or that kind of things. When contemporary philosophers look at the medieval debate on intentionality, they usually have in mind what we call “Brentano’s thesis”.
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