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Using two late medieval treatises from Bohemia as examples, the study presents various ways of creating images in the context of the art of memory, showing a tension between relying on common, generally shared associations which the mind easily interprets, and using rare, personal connections which are imprinted in one’s mind more deeply. The tension remains unresolved: both methods are applied in the art of memory, the actual choice seems to be ad hoc. Both types of associations provide a unique and so far neglected insight into the medieval mind.

In spite of the acknowledged crucial role it had in forming medieval written culture, the Bible and a wide-range of parabiblical texts still remain largely ignored by histories of medieval literatures. The reason for this striking omission of an important group of medieval texts from the 'canonical' narratives is, as I argue, the strong bias in favour of national, secular, fictional, and original texts which shapes literary studies – an inheritance from the nineteenth-century nationalising approaches discussed in the first issue of the Interfaces journal. Of course, the discipline of literary studies and therefore selection, hierarchization, and interpretation are complex social, cultural and political processes where almost anything is possible. It is the environment, the interpretive community, in which the interpretation takes place that has a decisive role. And that, too, is constantly being transformed. Thus, there are no final categories and answers because as long as there are interpretive communities, meanings are generated and operate in new ways. That is why the present discussion does not aim to claim that many of the parabiblical texts are literature and should have been included in the canon of medieval literature. Rather, I examine what the nineteenth-century notion of canon did to these texts and how the current questioning and substantial reshaping of notions of canon can transform our understanding of parabiblical texts.

Issue No. 4 is the first open issue of Interfaces: A Journal of Medieval European Literatures. It contains contributions by Henry Bainton (12th-century historiography), Lucie Doležalová (parabiblical texts and the canon), Máire Ní Mhaonaigh (Irish literary culture in Latin and Irish), Isabel Varillas Sánchez (legends of composition of canonical texts, Septuaginta), Wim Verbaal (letter collections, Bernard of Clairvaux), and Jonas Wellendorf (canons of skaldic poets in the 12th/13th century), preceded by a brief Introduction by the editors.

La présentation d'une méthode traductologique basée sur l'idée d'un message à décoder, étant donné l'inégalité des connaissances chez l'auteur et chez le traducteur vis-à-vis du texte. De différentes grilles de traduction, linguistiques et extralinguistiques sont proposées afin de faciliter la compréhension du message original en entier qui est nécessaire pour pouvoir le transmettre inchangé dans la langue cible.