clerkliness
English
[edit]Etymology
[edit]Noun
[edit]clerkliness (uncountable)
- (archaic) scholarship (character or qualities of a scholar)
- 1758, Hugh Latimer, The sermons of the Right Reverend Father in God, Master Hugh Latimer, Bishop of Worcester, page 265:
- And yet here in this Sermon of Jonah is no great curiousness, not great clerkliness, no great affectation of words, nor painted eloquence; it was none other but, "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be destroyed;" it was no more.
- 2000, Debora B. Schwartz, “Par Bel Mentir:Chrétien's Hermits and Clerkly Responsibility”, in Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, editor, Translatio Studii, page 290:
- I would argue that Ogrin is significant preciesly for the way in which these two aspects of clerkliness are intertwined: his moral guidance falters at the very moment when his literary skill is most apparent, when he rewrites the story of Tristan and Iseut in a letter designed to reconcile the lovers with King Marc.
- 2005, Corinne J. Saunders, Cultural Encounters in the Romance of Medieval England, page 139:
- The posture of 'clerkliness' adopted at the beginning of Sir Gowther might be read as the poet's attempt to clothe himself in a similarly ' scientific ' , Hippocratic aura . Learned Latin discourse on demons itself often insists on its own 'clerkliness' in this context — its own indebtedness to a distinctively bookish tradition of intellectual investigation —in very much the same way the Sir Gowther does, and for much the same reasons.
- The character or qualities of a clerk; the quality of being clerkish; orderliness, attention to detail, diligence, and/or a focus on bureaucratic tasks or recordkeeping.
- 1854, Herman Melville, The Encantadas:
- The letter found in the hut is also somewhat different, for while at the Encantadas he was informed that, not only did it evince a certain clerkliness, but was full of the strangest satiric effrontery which does not adequately appear in Porter's version.
- 1925, Warwick Deeping, Sorrell and Son: Family Tale:
- And these months of waiting, of trailing about wards and corridors, this pen and paper game, the clerkliness, while the real work went on about him, and he envied the men who did it, and sometimes came near hating them.
- 2017, Jerry Root, The Theophilus Legend in Medieval Text and Image, page 55:
- Some other images of the contracts […] take this verisimilitude one step further and illustrate with their neat rows and columns the very idea of clerkliness, order, accountability.