Unruly women constantly speak out in lyric poetry, their voices brought to life in the bodies of female singers, dancers, and instrumentalists. Performing Women is the first book-length study of female performers in Galician-Portuguese and Castilian comic-satiric poetry. Filios reconstructs medieval women's oral performances by bringing modern ethnographic work and performance theory to bear on literary and historical evidence. Filios explores how women's performances (and men's impersonations of women) contributed to the construction of the court, the marketplace, and the countryside as cultural spaces defined by certain acts, discourses, and conflicts. She argues that poetic portraits of sexually aggressive courtesans, bread sellers, and mountain women allowed elite men to portray their own sexuality as transgressive and to adopt temporarily a female identity, enabling them to speak and act as a degraded other. While these portraits may be misogynistic, they also demonstrate that poets appreciated marginalized women's characters, placing speeches overtly critical of dominant power structures in their mouths and constructing imaginary communities around them. Men wrote these characters, women appropriated them, ironically performing as themselves. By situating medieval lyric poems in their dialogic performance context, this study demonstrates the centrality female performers in poetic spectacles.

Shakespeare and the Middle Ages brings together a distinguished, multidisciplinary group of scholars to rethink the medieval origins of modernity. Shakespeare provides them with the perfect focus, since his works turn back to the Middle Ages as decisively as they anticipate the modern world: almost all of the histories depict events during the Hundred Years War, and King John glances even further back to the thirteenth-century Angevins; several of the comedies, tragedies, and romances rest on medieval sources; and there are important medieval antecedents for some of the poetic modes in which he worked as well.
Several of the essays reread Shakespeare by recovering aspects of his works that are derived from medieval traditions and whose significance has been obscured by the desire to read Shakespeare as the origin of the modern. These essays, taken cumulatively, challenge the idea of any decisive break between the medieval period and early modernity by demonstrating continuities of form and imagination that clearly bridge the gap. Other essays explore the ways in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries constructed or imagined relationships between past and present. Attending to the way these writers thought about their relationship to the past makes it possible, in turn, to read against the grain of our own teleological investment in the idea of early modernity. A third group of essays reads texts by Shakespeare and his contemporaries as documents participating in social-cultural transformation from within. This means attending to the way they themselves grapples with the problem of change, attempting to respond to new conditions and pressures while holding onto customary habits of thought and imagination. Taken together, the essays in this volume revisit the very idea of transition in a refreshingly non-teleological way.

This volume proposes a multidisciplinary approach to the history of Ancient Greek. Each of its ten papers offers a methodological example of how the study of Greek can be greatly enhanced by a truly multidisciplinary perspective in which the analysis of language interacts with epigraphy, textual philology and comparative linguistics, yet without neglecting the role that linguistic features play in the texts in which they are used, and hence in the culture which produced both. The first four papers tackle epic language, addressing eccentric pronouns and formulas, the role and semantics of the middle perfect, and the development of hexameter poetry in the colonial West. The next two papers are devoted to lyric poetry and its linguistic influence in Greek literature and tackle fragments by Corinna and Epicharmus respectively. The remaining four contributions look into a variety of topics spanning from early Ionic prose to the diachronic development of the Greek lexicon and its reception in Byzantine lexicography. They all provide examples of how Greek literary language evolved across the centuries, how it was perceived by ancient scholars, and what contribution modern linguistic approaches can provide to our understanding of both these issues.

This book is a major re-appraisal of the Commedia as originally envisaged by Dante: as a work of ethics. Privileging the ethical, Corbett increases our appreciation of Dante's eschatological innovations and literary genius. Drawing upon a wider range of moral contexts than in previous studies, this book presents an overarching account of the complex ordering and political programme of Dante's afterlife. Balancing close readings with a lucid overview of Dante's Commedia as an ethical and political manifesto, Corbett cogently approaches the poem through its moral structure. The book provides detailed interpretations of three particularly significant vices - pride, sloth, and avarice - and the three terraces of Purgatory devoted to them. While scholars register Dante's explicit confession of pride, the volume uncovers Dante's implicit confession of sloth and prodigality (the opposing subvice of avarice) through Statius, his moral cypher.

This volume of essays offers innovations in teaching Chaucer in higher education. The projects explored in this study focus on a student-centred, active learning designed to enhance independent research skills and critical thinking. These studies also seek to establish conversations - between teachers and learners, and students and their texts.

Studies in the Age of Chaucer is the annual yearbook of the New Chaucer Society, publishing articles on the writing of Chaucer and his contemporaries, their antecedents and successors, and their intellectual and social contexts. More generally, articles explore the culture and writing of later medieval Britain (1200-1500). Each SAC volume also includes an annotated bibliography and reviews of Chaucer-related publications.

Hierocles of Alexandria was a Neoplatonic philosopher of the fifth century AD. Hermann S. Schibli surveys his life, writings, and pagan and Christian surroundings, and succinctly examines the major points of his philosophy, both contemplative and practical. He includes the first modern English translations, with helpful notes, of Hierocles' Commentary on the Golden Verses of the Pythagoreans and of the remnants of his treatise On Providence.

Simplicius and Priscian were two of the seven Neoplatonists who left Athens when the Christian Emperor Justinian closed the pagan school there in AD 529. Their commentaries on works on sense perception, one by Aristotle and one by his successor Theophrastus, are translated here in one volume. Both commentaries give a highly Neoplatonized reading to their Aristotelian subjects and give an insight into late Neoplatonist psychology.

Stanley Lombardo's deft abridgment of his 2005 translation of the Aeneid preserves the arc and weight of Virgil's epic by presenting major books in their entirety and abridged books in extended passages seamlessly fitted together with narrative bridges. W. R. Johnson's Introduction, a shortened version of his masterly Introduction to that translation, will be welcomed by both beginning and seasoned students of the Aeneid , and by students of Roman history, classical mythology, and Western civilization.

"Liberating Hellenism from the Ottoman Empire" explores two key historical episodes that have generally escaped the notice of modern Greece, the Near East, and their observers alike. In the midst of the highly charged context of West-East confrontation and with fundamental cultural and political issues at stake, these episodes prove to be exciting and important platforms from which to reexamine the age-old conflict. This book reaches beyond the standard sources to dig into the archives for important events that have fallen through the cracks of the study of emerging modern Greece and the Ottoman Empire. These events, in which French travel writing, literary fiction, antiquarianism, and nineteenth-century western and eastern geopolitics merge, invite us to redraw the outlines of mutually dependent Hellenism and Orientalism.

The text of Ovid's Metamorphoses is not as indisputably established as one might think. Many passages are still obscure or plainly corrupt. 550 manuscripts, 500 editions and reprints, as well as countless critical notes and works must be taken into account when trying to establish the most reliable text for new generations of readers. This volume provides a detailed line-by-line analysis of Book XIII and offers thereby an indispensable starting point for a new critical edition not only of this but also of other parts of the poem.

The Narrative Grotesque examines late medieval narratology in two Older Scots poems: Gavin Douglas's The Palyce of Honour (c.1501) and William Dunbar's The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo (c.1507). The narrative grotesque is exemplified in these poems, which fracture narratological boundaries by fusing disparate poetic forms and creating hybrid subjectivities. Consequently, these poems interrogate conventional boundaries in poetic making. The narrative grotesque is applied as a framework to elucidate these chimeric texts and to understand newly late medieval engagement with poetics and narratology. -- .

Studies in the Age of Chaucer is the annual yearbook of the New Chaucer Society, publishing articles on the writing of Chaucer and his contemporaries, their antecedents and successors, and their intellectual and social contexts. More generally, articles explore the culture and writing of later medieval Britain (1200-1500). Each SAC volume also includes an annotated bibliography and reviews of Chaucer-related publications.

Focusing on issues of interpretation, this book collects and translates a number of medieval mi'raj accounts. The narratives of Muhammad's heavenly journey offer a prism through which to view the medieval elite's communal, political and theological motives. These accounts reveal the historiographic process in which a single event becomes a focal point for those struggling to define the past and establish a communal, confessional and political identity by reporting the apparant facts about a particular moment in time. In other words, these tales have real stakes for both their authors and their audiences, and shed light on Muslim communal concerns from the late eighth through to the fourteenth century. Brooke Olson Vuckovic's groundbreaking study provides readers access to the documentation and translation of these lesser-known Arabic texts, and uncovers their role in building a meaningful, cohesive and coherent Muslim community in medieval times.

This is an exploration of how the legend of Thor has been adopted, adapted and transformed through history. The myths of the Norse god Thor were preserved in the "Icelandic Eddas", set down in the early Middle Ages. The bane of giants and trolls, Thor was worshipped as the last line of defence against all that threatened early Nordic society. Thor's significance persisted long after the Christian conversion and, in the mid-eighteenth century, Thor resumed a symbolic prominence among northern countries. Admired and adopted in Scandinavia and Germany, he became central to the rhetoric of national romanticism and to more belligerent assertions of nationalism. Resurrected in the latter part of the twentieth century in "Marvel Magazine", Thor was further transformed into an articulation both of an anxious male sexuality and of a parallel nervousness regarding American foreign policy. Martin Arnold explores the extraordinary regard in which Thor has been held since medieval times and considers why and how his myth has been adopted, adapted and transformed.

This new volume in the Routledge Medieval Casebooks series explores medieval rhetorical practices. Ten original essays examine the ways in which contemporary readers and scholars might employ rhetorical theory to illuminate underlying meanings in medieval texts. The contributors also explore how rhetoric was used as a means of textual innovation in the work of medieval authors such as Chaucer and his contemporaries.

Why do we remember some parts of the historical past, and forget others? Collective memory acts as a filter, a process mediated by ideology, chance, and the very structures of narrative and memory. "Remembering the Early Modern Voyage "uses three rich case studies to examine the operations of memory on the sixteenth and seventeenth century origins of Anglophone North America: Richard Hakluyt's famous anthology of Elizabethan voyages, Captain John Smith's eccentric autobiography, and the little known history of early modern Newfoundland. Attending not only to the narratives themselves, but to their use and reuse over several centuries, this book offers interrogations and recalibrations of a history still critical for the present.""

A vivid exploration of the many ways the classical world remains relevant today, this is a passionate justification of why we continue to read about and study the lives and works of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Challenging the way the phrase 'That's just ancient history' is used to dismiss something as being irrelevant, Greg and Alicia Aldrete demonstrate just how much ancient Greece and Rome have influenced and shaped our world today in ways both large and small. From the more commonly known influences on politics, law, literature and timekeeping through to the everyday rituals and routines we take for granted when we exercise, dine, marry and dress, we are rooted in the ancient world. Even the political upheaval, celebrity obsession and blurring of public and private boundaries that we see in current news betray ancient characteristics - now brought to the fore here in a new final chapter. If you have ever wondered how far exactly we still walk in the footsteps of the ancients or wanted to understand how study of the classical world can inform and explain our lives today, this is the book for you.

A concise guide to Classical Mythology by a well respected expert in the field which allows students to contextualize primary sources with information about the culture and society in which they were conceived. A new chapter focuses on the use of myth in the modern world, allowing student to examine critically the persuasive power of well-known images from antiquity and how these images can be exploited. Provides an authoritative guide to students in a field which has become distorted by pet theories and reinterpretations, allowing students to engage with with key academic theories without losing sight of the myths themselves. Guides students through Classical Mythology from the earliest myths to modern retellings in computer games, films, art and music allowing the students to see a continuum between work and identify key trends in the reception of mythic stories.

This volume contains word-for-word commentaries on Pindar's Olympian Odes 3, 7, 12, 14. Emphasis is placed on the explanations of peculiarities of grammar and idiom, but due attention is paid to figures of style and problems of poetic structure. The interpretations proposed by the author - many of them which are new - are documented as fully, but at the same time as concisely, as possible. This documentation, which includes a critical examination of other views, has been made more easily accessible by detailed indexes. The poems discussed do not have special similarities or interrelationships. On the other hand, they may be considered representative of the poet's art. From this point of view, the present selection may serve as an introduction to the study of Pindar's work. Vol. II will contain commentaries on Olympians 1, 10, 11, Nemean 11, and Isthmian 2. A third volume on Pythians 1, 8, 10 is inteded to conclude the series.

Essays examining the compiler and contents of two of the most important and significant extant late medieval manuscript collections. The Yorkshire landowner Robert Thornton (c.1397- c.1465) copied the contents of two important manuscripts, Lincoln Cathedral, MS 91 (the "Lincoln manuscript"), and London, British Library, MS Additional 31042 (the "London manuscript") in the middle decades of the fifteenth century. Viewed in combination, his books comprise a rare repository of varied English and Latin literary, religious and medical texts that survived the dissolution of the monasteries, when so many other medieval books were destroyed. Residing in the texts he copied and used are many indicators of what this gentleman scribe of the North Riding read, how he practised his religion, and what worldly values he held for himself and his family. Because of the extraordinary nature of his collected texts - Middle English romances, alliterative verse (the alliterative Morte Arthure only exists here), lyrics and treatises of religion ormedicine - editors and scholars have long been deeply interested in uncovering Thornton's habits as a private, amateur scribe. The essays collected here provide, for the first time, a sustained, focussed light on Thornton and hisbooks. They examine such matters as what Thornton as a scribe made, how he did it, and why he did it, placing him in a wider context and looking at the contents of the manuscripts. Susanna Fein is Professor of Englishat Kent State University; Michael Johnston is an Assistant Professor of English at Purdue University. Contributors: Julie Nelson Couch, Susanna Fein, Rosalind Field, Joel Fredell, Ralph Hanna, Michael Johnston, George R. Keiser, Julie Orlemanski, Mary Michele Poellinger, Dav Smith, Thorlac Turville-Petre.

This book addresses the vexed status of literary value. Unlike other approaches, it pursues neither an apologetic thesis about literature's defining values nor, conversely, a demystifying account of those values' ideological uses. Instead, arguing that the category of literary value is inescapable, it focuses pragmatically on everyday scholarly and pedagogical activities, proposing how we may reconcile that category's inevitability with our understandable wariness of its uncertainties and complicities. Toward these ends, it offers a preliminary theory of literary valuing and explores the problem of literary value in respect to the literary edition, canonicity and interpretation. Much of this exploration occurs within Chaucer studies, which, because of Chaucer's simultaneous canonicity and marginality, provides fertile ground for thinking through the problem's challenges. Using this subfield as a synecdoche, the book seeks to forge a viable rationale for literary studies generally. -- .

A fresh examination of the four poems of the Cotton manuscript, arguing that they share a profound theological vision. Pearl, Cleanness, Patience and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are accomplished examples of four different literary genres and represent some of the finest poetry in Middle English. They are, by turns, fast and funny, powerfully dramatic, gentle and ironic, telling of painful bereavement and the terror of victims of disaster and violence, as well as the comic bewilderment of people entangled in alarmingly mysterious situations. The anonymous poet's evident delight in the pleasures and artistry of courtly life has led some readers to suggest that he was a gifted but complacent frequenter of courts, his attention dedicated to the wealthy and his sympathies to thepowerful, and moreover, that his poems pay the merest lipservice to religious observance. God and the Gawain-poet argues that, on the contrary, the poet's wide-ranging engagement with all human life explicitly acknowledgesall material creation as God's gift, revelling in its physicality, in bodily senses and movement and the ways a community celebrates itself. Dr Hatt shows how, in exhorting readers to recognize and respond to the narrative of divine gift, he appears as an energetic Christian poet and a humane and compassionate observer. Cecilia A. Hatt gained her D.Phil from Oxford University.

The foremost critical edition of the Greek lyric poets: Alcman, Stesichorus, Ibycus, Anacreon, Simonides and Corinna, and other minor poets, and songs and fragments.

This book offers an examination of Cicero's speech, the "Pro Balbo," which was delivered during a momentous period of Roman history, in defence of a highly influential political advisor of Caesar who was charged under the "lex Papia" for an illegal grant of citizenship. The first detailed study of the speech, this study analyzes the work according to the ancient rhetorical categories: types of arguments ("inventio": ethos, pathos and logos), the arrangement of these arguments ("dispositio"), and the use of style ("elocutio"). Kimberly Barber takes a thorough look at Cicero's technique, providing an understanding of the speech and illuminating the rhetorical issues raised by its legal context.