Literary studies: ancient, classical and medieval Books

Bringing alive the dramatic poems of Old Norse heroic legend, this new collection offers accessible, ground-breaking and inspiring essays which introduce and analyse the exciting legends of the two doomed Helgis and their valkyrie lovers; the...

This cutting-edge collection of essays offers provocative studies of ancient history, literature, gender identifications and roles, and subsequent interpretations of the republican and imperial Roman past. The prose and poetry of Cicero and Petronius,...

For all that Cicero is often seen as the father of translation theory, his and other Roman comments on translation are often divorced from the complicated environments that produced them. The first book-length study in English of its kind, Roman Theories...

Letters were an important medium of everyday communication in the ancient Mediterranean. Soon after its emergence, the epistolary form was adopted by educated elites and transformed into a literary genre, which developed distinctive markers and was used,...

Vitality and change marked twelfth- and thirteenth-century medieval Mediterranean society. Many sought to capitalize upon resurgences in economic success, political intrigue, and social cohesion. Alfonso II (1162-1196) and his son Peter II (1196-1213)...

This book presents waste as an aesthetic category that introduces an arsy-versy world where detritus is precious. This aesthetic is applied in the second part to etymology, poking through the "paternal dungheaps" of words, and tracing their origins not...

Truth and Wonder is an accessible introduction to Plato and Aristotle, showing their crucial influence for literary and cultural studies, modern languages and related disciplines. It focusses on both what Plato and Aristotle say about literature and how...

Dante and the Blessed Virgin is distinguished philosopher Ralph McInerny's eloquent reading of one of western literature's most famous works by a Catholic writer. The book provides Catholic readers new to Dante's The Divine Comedy (or Commedia) with a...

There are several good histories of Greek literature of various shapes and sizes, but the purpose of this book is not simply to consider the literature of ancient Greece as an isolated subject, treating each of the literary modes - epic, lyric, drama,...

How Greek Tragedy Works is a journey through the hidden meanings and dual nature of Greek tragedy, drawing on its foremost dramatists to bring about a deeper understanding of how and why to engage with these enduring plays. Brian Kulick dispels the...

Originally published in 1984, The Image of the Middle Ages in Romantic and Victorian Literature looks at the impact of medievalism in the 18th and 19th centuries and the importance of post-Enlightenment literary religious medievalism. The book suggests...

This authoritative anthology puts to rest the general impression that traditional rhetoric had little impact during the years between the death of St. Augustine and Bracciolini's rediscovery of Quintilian. It covers 36 rhetorical treatises.

In Dante's Commedia: Theology as Poetry, an international group of theologians and Dante scholars provide a uniquely rich set of perspectives focused on the relationship between theology and poetry in the Commedia. Examining Dante's treatment of...

Memory, Images, and the English Corpus Christi Drama uniquely brings together memory theory, medieval and contemporary images, cognition, and the English Corpus Christi drama. Lerud argues that the role of frames or backgrounds is integral to the image...

This book critically examines the origins of American diplomacy in the greater Persian Gulf region, arguing that it was the inability of the United States to contend effectively with the disintegration of British imperial authority in the Gulf that...

Did medieval women have the power to choose? This is a question at the heart of this book which explores three court cases from Yorkshire in the decades after the Black Death. Alice de Rouclif was a child heiress made to marry the illegitimate son of the...

This volume examines the common medieval notion of life experience as a source of wisdom and traces that theme through different texts and genres to uncover the fabric of experience woven into the writings by, for, and about women.

PART I: Francis in Medieval Text and Painting * Franciscan Spirituality and Narrative at Assisi: The Legend of St. Francis in Text and Painting - Beth Mulvaney * The Miraculous Moment: Expressing the Spiritual Experience in Thirteenth-Century Frescos at...

This book interrogates our ideas about heterosexuality through examination of medieval romance narratives. Familiar configurations of romantic fiction such as male desire overwhelming feminine reluctance and the aloof masculine hero undone by love derive...

Geoffrey Chaucer was not a writer, primarily, but a privileged official place-holder. Prone to violence, including rape, assault, and extortion, the poet was employed first at domestic personal service and subsequently at policework of various sorts,...

At present, many governments are privatizing social security programs, largely on the ground that these programs are expensive and harmful to economic development. This book provides the first systematic analysis of the relationship between social...

This study examines the post-medieval reception of Vienna's women's monastic institutions as historical icons of the medieval past. Over time, the eight major women's convents of Vienna become linked in the popular mind with the broader mythology of...

In the newly-identified genre of medieval patience literature, female protagonists move to the center of the action-an unusual feature compared to most medieval literature. Out of this development, fresh interpretations of early medieval works and...

Market Power explores society and economy in medieval Iberia, examining the intersection of regional commercial interests, lordship, and royal authority as part of the evolution of a small village into a rural market town. This analysis of notarial...

Boccaccio's Decameron and the Ciceronian Renaissance is a path-breaking study of a timeless masterpiece. Based on new readings of Cicero's late works, De legibus, De re publica, and De officiis, Michaela Paasche Grudin and Robert Grudin show that...

The author analyzes how Ovidian-inspired mythologies and bibliographical aetiologies informed the sixteenth-century creation, reproduction, and representation of books, and provides alternative models for thinking about the dynamics of reception,...

In the two golden centuries that followed the death of Socrates, ancient philosophy underwent a tremendous transformation that culminated in the philosophical systematizations of Plato, Aristotle and the Hellenistic schools. Fundamental figures other...

Based on the conviction that only translators who write poetry themselves can properly re-create the celebrated and timeless tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the Greek Tragedy in New Translations series offers new translations that go...

First published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The book reviews scholarly literature and archival sources including maps and diagrams, to better situate Siena's achievement in urban history and broadens our understanding of medieval technology and urban life.

Nine new studies address the phenomenon of the medieval pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, the legendary burying place of St. James.

The Middle Ages provides a particularly rich trove of hybrid creatures, semi-human beings, and composite bodies: we need only consider manuscript pages and stone capitals in Romanesque churches to picture the myriad figures incorporating both human and...

In this new edition Musa views Dante's intention as one of cruel and comic commentary on the shallowness and self-pity of his protagonist, who only occasionally glimpses the true nature of love. ". . . the explication de texte which accompanies [Musa's]...

The plays collected in Sisters of Gore span the development of Gothic melodrama from the 1790s to the 1840s.

Pornographic Sensibilities stages a conversation between two fields-Medieval/Early Modern Hispanic Studies and Porn Studies-that traditionally have had little to say to each other. The collection offers innovative new approaches to the study of gendered...