Literary studies: ancient, classical and medieval Books

The Epicureans were notorious in antiquity for denigrating most forms of civic participation and for rejecting those cultural activities (such as poetry, music, and rhetoric) which are broadly labelled paideia. In this, as in all else, they ostensibly...

Ovid, Rome's most cynical and worldly love poet, has not until recently been highly regarded among Latin poets. Now, however, his reputation is growing, and this volume is an important contribution to the re-establishment of Ovid's claims to critical...

Despite the general scholarly consensus about Lucretius' debt to Empedocles as the father of the genre of cosmological didactic epic, there is a major disagreement regarding Lucretius' applause for his Presocratic predecessor's praeclara reperta (DRN 1...

Research into the emotions is beginning to gain momentum in Anglo-Saxon studies. In order to integrate early medieval Britain into the wider scholarly research into the history of emotions (a major theme in other fields and a key field in...

This important new contribution to the history of the body analyzes the role of filth as the material counterpart of sin in medieval thought. Using a wide range of texts, including theology, historical documents, and literature from Augustine to Chaucer,...

A study of ancient Rome as a prominent topic in the works of Middle English poets. Discusses how each these poets conceives of ancient Rome and Romans, both pagan and Christian, and why it matters to their work. Includes the works of Gower, Chaucer,...

Examines the ghost stories of writer and academic Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936). Focuses on the intersection between his scholarly work and his fiction, arguing that his two careers are intriguingly intertwined.

A leading authority in the field, Phillip Harding here presents the very first English translations of the six Athenian writers known as the Atthitographers.

Steven Rozenski reopens old discussions and addresses new ones concerning late medieval devotional texts, particularly those showing continental and German influences.For many, Martin Luther's translation of the Bible into German has come to define the...

From the dawn of the early modern period around 1400 until the eighteenth century, Latin was still the European language and its influence extended as far as Asia and the Americas. At the same time, the production of Latin writing exploded thanks to book...

This book explores the ways in which discourses of religious, racial, and national identity blur and engage each other in the medieval West. Specifically, the book studies depictions of Muslims in England during the 1330s and argues that these...

Hellenic Common argues that theatrical adaptations of Greek tragedy exemplify the functioning of a cosmopolitan cultural commonwealth.

This volume explores the reception of the classical past in the works of 20th century American dramatist Robert E. Sherwood and his use of the ancient world to critique key events and trends in American history.

Every human being knows that we are walking through life following trails, whether we are aware of them or not. Medieval poets, from the anonymous composer of Beowulf to Marie de France, Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried von Strassburg, and Guillaume de Lorris...

Scholars have long been interested in the extent to which the Anglo-Saxon past can be understood using material written, and produced, in the twelfth century; and simultaneously in the continued importance (or otherwise) of the Anglo-Saxon past in the...

Examining the fairies of medieval romance as liminal beings, this book draws on anthropological and philosophical studies of liminality to combine folkloristic insights into the nature of fairies with close readings of selected romance texts. Tracing...

Hundreds perished in Rome's Second Proscription, but one victim is remembered above all others. Cicero stands out, however, not only because of his fame, but also because his murder included a unique addition to the customary decapitation. For his corpse...

First published in 1990, Chaucer and the Social Contest takes a fresh view of The Canterby Tales, by placing the storytelling contest among the Canterbury pilgrims within the larger social contests in the changing England of the late fourteenth century...

As the story of the war between the sons of Oedipus and their cursed race, the Theban legend rivaled that of Troy in popularity and importance for medieval poets and audiences. Dominique Battles explores the vernacular Theban narratives of the Middle...

Much has been written about women of the English Renaissance, but few examples of women's writing from that era have been readily available until now. This remarkable anthology assembles for the first time 144 primary texts and documents written by women...

This outstanding introductory survey collects, presents and examines, for the very first time, the portraits and representations of Alexander the Great on the ancient coins of the Greek and Roman period.From 320 BC to AD 400, Karsten Dahmen examines not...

In Savage Economy: The Returns of Middle English Romance, Walter Wadiak traces the evolution of the medieval English romance from its thirteenth-century origins to 1500, and from a genre that affirmed aristocratic identity to one that appealed more...

While the structure and themes of the Divine Comedy are defined by the narrative of a spiritual pilgrimage guided by Christian truth, Winthrop Wetherbee's remarkable new study reveals that Dante's engagement with the great Latin poets Vergil, Ovid,...

In The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters: Arabic Knowledge Construction, Muhsin J. al-Musawi offers a groundbreaking study of literary heritage in the medieval and premodern Islamic period. Al-Musawi challenges the paradigm that considers the period...

Sacred and profane, public and private, emotive and ritualistic, internal and embodied, medieval weeping served as a culturally charged prism for a host of social, visual, cognitive, and linguistic performances. Crying in the Middle Ages addresses the...

The medieval monster is a slippery construct, and its referents include a range of religious, racial, and corporeal aberrations. In this study, Miller argues that one incarnation of monstrosity in the Middle Ages-the female body-exists in special...

This book focuses on the influence of classical authors on Ben Jonson's dramaturgy, with particular emphasis on the Greek and Roman playwrights and satirists.

A collection of essays addressing the relevance, explanatory power, and exclusionary effects of the technical vocabulary of rhetorical theory.

The Call to Read is the first full-length study to situate the surviving oeuvre of Reginald Pecock in the context of current scholarship on English vernacular theology of the late medieval period. Kirsty Campbell examines the important and innovative...

First Published in 2002. This book is about the way medieval authors wrote about union with God and how they used language that refers to the senses to articulate their ideas about how a person can be one with God. Rudy argues that such explicit concepts...

As the oldest literary Latin preserved in any quantity, the language of Livius shows many features of linguistic interest and raises intriguing questions of phonolgy, morphology and syntax.

This book studies the phenomena of monsters and marvels from the time of Pliny the Elder through the 14th century.

Brings together interrelated essays on aspects of oral production and reception in Western European medieval contexts from modern and post-structuralist perspectives. The contributors discusss the physical, social and semiotic qualities of medieval...

Ancient sources and modern scholars have often represented the Athenian festival of Adonis as a marginal and faintly ridiculous private women's ritual. Seeds were planted each year in pots and, once sprouted, carried to the rooftops, where women lamented...

The central theme in any history of texts and books must be that of change and renewal: Parchment that is written on, in one set of circumstances in late antiquity, may in the Early Middle Ages be scraped clean and written on again, leaving evidence of a...

This edited collection explores the importance of the Jews in the English Christian imagination of the 14th and 15th centuries - long after their expulsion from Britain in 1290.

This volume, offering an insight into the literary world of Rome in the fourth century AD, reflects an increased interest in the writers of the 150 years before the collapse of the Western Empire, who have long been over-shadowed by the pre-eminence...

Adjudication between conflicting normative universes that do not share the same vocabulary, standards of rationality, and moral commitments cannot be resolved by recourse to traditional principles. Such cases are always in a sense tragic. And what is...

In The Embodied Word: Female Spiritualities, Contested Orthodoxies, and English Religious Cultures, 1350-1700, Nancy Bradley Warren expands on the topic of female spirituality, first explored in her book Women of God and Arms, to encompass broad issues...

Agnes of Harcourt is an important though little-known 13th-century author. Born into a leading Norman noble family, she became an abbess at the new royal Franciscan abbey of Longchamp, founded just outside of Paris by Isabelle of France, sister of Louis...

A Courtier's Mirror establishes the unique importance of Thomasin von Zerclaere's Welscher Gast as a document of social practices and concerns in medieval German-speaking court society. This epic-length illustrated didactic poem enjoyed immense...

For centuries England's writers used the metaphor of their country as an island garden to engage in a self-conscious debate about national identity. In The Island Garden: England's Language of Nation from Gildas to Marvell, Lynn Staley suggests that the...