This study shows how contemporary theory can serve to clarify structures of identity and economies of desire in medieval texts. Bringing the resources of psychoanalytic and poststructuralist theory to bear on Chaucer's tales about women, this book addresses those registers of the Canterbury project that remain major concerns for recent feminist theory: the specificity of feminine desire, the cultural articulation of gender, the logic of sacrifice as a cultural ideal, the structure of misogyny and domestic violence. This book maps out the ways in which Chaucer's rhetoric is not merely an element of style or an instrument of persuasion but the very matrix for the representation of de-centered subjectivity.

The magisterial Oxford History of English Literature is here reissued in its entirety, so that readers can collect any volumes that they missed on first publication, and new purchasers can obtain all thirteen published volumes at once. For the purposes of the reissue certain of the volumes have been retitled and the series has been renumbered; all volumes appear in handsome matching jackets. Of the two outstanding volumes, The Victorian Novel will be available in , (see P. 00), and The English Drama 1588-1642 will follow. Reviews of the volumes on their first publication spoke of `traditional literary scholarship at its best' and `essential basic reading for anyone who is interested in the subject'. The series - individual volumes of which can be purchased separately - should appeal to general readers and students alike.

Xenophon's many and varied works represent a major source of information about the ancient Greek world: for example, about culture, politics, social life and history in the fourth century BC, Socrates, horses and hunting with dogs, the Athenian economy, and Sparta. However, there has been controversy about how his works should be read. This selection of significant modern critical essays will introduce readers to the wide range of his writing, the debates it has inspired, and the interpretative methodologies that have been used. A specially written Introduction by Vivienne J. Gray offers a survey of Xenophon's works, an account of his life with respect to them, a brief discussion of modern readings, reference to modern scholarship since the original publication of the articles, and a critical summary of their content. Several articles have been translated for the first time from French and German, and all quotations have been translated into English.

An important text from the "twelfth-century Renaissance" of history writing re-evaluated, drawing out its complex representations of monarchs from Cnut to William Rufus. Geffrei Gaimar's Estoire des Engleis is its author's sole surviving work. His translation and adaptation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, expanded with a number of lengthy interpolations which appear to draw upon oral traditions and other, unknown written sources, is all that remains of an ambitious history which once reached back as far as Jason and the Golden Fleece. However, the extent of Gaimar's achievement - as poet, historian, and translator - has been obscured by a tendency among scholars to dismiss him as a writer of romance masquerading as history, his work riddled with guesswork, errors, and outright fabrications. This volume aims to challenge such views of Gaimar by providing the first holistic study of his Estoire's incisive commentary upon kingship: its virtues, vices and conflicting models, as applied to rulers such as Edgar "the Peaceable", Cnut, and the ill-fated William Rufus. One good king, for Gaimar, is much like another. A bad king, by contrast, is vividly characterised as ineffectual, tyrannical, or both. Gaimar, a product of that extraordinary period in medieval English culture often termed the "twelfth-century Renaissance'" blends history with literary tropes to yield a sophisticated account of the invasions, betrayals, and familial conflicts that shaped his England's history.

Historical research into emotionality is at present generally enjoying an heightened level of interest. This bilingual volume documents the proceedings of an international conference, discussing current paradigms and perspectives in historical literary research into emotions and heightening awareness of the mediality of cultures of emotion in historical change. The discussion of methodological questions opens up avenues for interdisciplinary research.

This study focuses on the character, literary precursors and effects of the language in Virgil's Eclogues. It is divided into four major sections: word formation, linguistic models, style level, personal names. Each section examines the influence of earlier poets (Theocritus, Callimachus, Ennius, Lucretius, Catullus et al.), the reception by later poets of the Augustan Age (Propertius, Tibullus, Ovid) and in particular the relationship of the Eclogues to Vergil's later work (Georgica, Aeneis).

Comprises of individual volumes on: Dante, Geoffrey Chaucer (2 volumes), Sir Thomas Malory, John Skelton and Edmund Spenser. The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling students and researchers to read for themselves, for example, comments on early performances of Shakespeare's plays, or reactions to the first publication of Jane Austen's novels. The carefully selected sources range from landmark essays in the history of criticism to journalism and contemporary opinion, and little published documentary material such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included, in order to demonstrate the fluctuations in an author's reputation. Each volume contains an introduction to the writer's published works, a selected bibliography, and an index of works, authors and subjects. The Collected Critical Heritage will be available as a set of 68 volumes and the series will also be available in mini sets selected by period (in slipcase boxes) and as individual volumes. Publication: October 1995.

This study of Early Christian literature and its influence on European thought and culture brings much to bear on a subject often overshadowed by the study of ancient Greek influences. The book, which begins with an excellent introduction by the author, covers Christian literature from its earliest manifestations in the first century to the Middle Ages. The author describes the lives of numerous writers (including Tertullian, St. Isidore of Seville and Arnobius) as well as their works and the ideas that shaped them, allowing readers to appreciate the rise of Latin literature and the historical circumstances that surrounded it.

This timely volume ventures into the subject of sadomasochism in varied aspects of medieval life. Saint's Lives and mystical treatises provide evidence of failed sadism and empowering masochism. Literary culture in the form of epics and courtly tales preserve stories of eroticised power. These exciting chapters join together to form a picture of medieval culture that is kinky in its practice and deeply psychological at its core. -- .

Learn why Cicero is considered one of the most important individuals in all of Western culture! Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC) was a poet, philosopher, writer, scholar, barrister, statesman, patriot, and the linguist who helped make Latin into a universal language. His many influences in rhetoric, politics, literature, and ideas are seen throughout Western civilization. Cicero, Classicism, and Popular Culture explores the fascinating man behind the eloquence and his monumental effect on language, morality, and popularity of Western culture. One of the leading authorities on popular culture, Dr. Marshall Fishwick discusses the multifaceted man who may be, besides Jesus, the central figure in all of Western civilization. The author recounts his own personal quest of traveling the land and ancient cities of Italy, gleaning insights from people he met along the way who have knowledge about Cicero's life and times. However, Cicero, Classicism, and Popular Culture is more than a simple search for the man and his accomplishments, a man whose mere words changed the way people think. This book shows in each of us the roots of our own ideas, beliefs, and culture. Cicero, Classicism, and Popular Culture discusses: Cicero's rise to acclaim his affect on the language of popular culture common traits Cicero shared with Thomas Jefferson rhetoric, the art of oratory community two pivotal essays on friendship and old age vision of his reputation the search for peace Marshall McLuhan, Ciceronian Cicero's Rome Cicero's ancestral home of Arpinum Julius Caesar, politics, and the influences of Cicero the Roman republic and its downfall America as the new Rome much more! Cicero, Classicism, and Popular Culture is a startling, entertaining examination of the man who made Western culture what it is today. The book is insightful reading for educators, students, or anyone interested in one of the major forces in popular culture.

"Envisaging Heaven in the Middle Ages" considers medieval notions of heaven in theological and mystical writings; in visions of the otherworld; and in medieval arts such as drama, poetry, music and vernacular literature.
The volume considers the influence of images and visions of heaven on the secular literature by some of the greatest writers of the period, such as Chretien de Troyes and Chaucer. The coherence and beauty of these notions make heaven one of the most impressive medieval cathedrals of the mind.
The book shows that the idea of heaven in the Middle Ages was as varied as those who wrote about it, and reveals the extent to which the Christian afterlife was (as it is today) a projection of human hopes and fears.
The book also reveals the extent to which the Christian afterlife was (as it is today) a projection of human hopes and fears. Because "the reality" of heaven was one based on speculation, as well as fancy, medieval heavens were products both of ingenious thought and of creative, wishful imagination.
With contributions from such experts as Peter Dronke, Robin Kirkpatrick, Peter Meredith, Bernard McGinn, Barbara Newman and A.C. Spearing, this collection will be essential reading for all those interested in medieval religion and culture.

In Plutarch: On the Face which Appears in the Orb of the Moon, Luisa Lesage Garriga offers a new critical edition with English translation of one of Plutarch's most fascinating treatises, and yet one of the least known to the wider public. Dealing with the nature and function of the moon from multiple perspectives, this treatise offers a comprehensive overview of scientific knowledge and religious-philosophical thought from the first centuries CE. The difficulty of Plutarch's style, the shortage of manuscripts, and the numerous text-critical interventions have often obscured the meaning of central passages of the treatise. By means of a new approach to the manuscripts' readings and a more lenient use of editorial interventions and conjectures, Luisa Lesage Garriga manages to bring innovative solutions to many of the problematic passages.

Pliny's Natural History has too often been regarded as simply a quarry for quaint stories--a view which has tended to overshadow its overall structure and purpose. In this book, Beagon redresses the balance and illuminates the Natural History as the work of an author with an identifiable mode of thinking and a coherent attitude toward his clearly-stated theme, Nature. Taking its cue from Pliny, the book examines his cosmology and in particular his portrayal of the relationship between nature and what he considered nature's greatest creation, Humankind. Author and work are also placed in their wider literary and historical context. Pliny himself emerges no longer as a faceless compiler but as a character with a valuable contribution to make to an understanding of intellectual attitudes in the first century A.D. A more typical Roman than most of the intellectual authors studied today, he can offer a much more accurate picture of the Roman in his "natural" setting.

The Paget Toynbee lectures on Dante have taken place in Oxford since the mid-1990s. Named after the great medieval scholar of the first half of the twentieth century, they have been delivered by the major Dante experts of our time. This volume gathers together twelve of the most significant lectures, given by internationally renowned scholars such as Zygmunt Baranski, John Barnes, Lino Leonardi, Emilio Pasquini, Michelangelo Picone, Jonathan Usher and the late Peter Armour. The topics range from key questions such as Dante, Ovid and the poetry of exile, to ground-breaking work on obscenity in the Divine Comedy.

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 work covers the history of the text of the invectives of Sallust against Cicero and of Cicero against Sallust. Though these speeches seem unsophisticated to some, they are in fact of considerable importance. The question of the authenticity of both invectives, especially of the invective against Cicero, considered in the book diachronically, has long troubled scholars, commencing with Quintilian's quotation from the text as though it were authentic. This dispute continues down to our own time. In all probability, both invectives are a product of the rhetorical schools of Rome, as students at such schools might have been set the task of writing a speech against Cicero imitating Sallust, or of responding to Sallust in the style of Cicero. Thus, we possess a sample of rhetorical school exercises, preserved due to their similarities to the prototypes on which they were modelled. The work covers: the full manuscript tradition of the text and also the history of the changes which arose during its transmission, the history of the printed text and the text itself with an apparatus criticus and also a translation. This work should be of interest to classicists, philologists interested in the history of medieval and renaissance texts, and also to those erudite readers concerned with rhetorical style and the functioning of the rhetorical schools of Rome.

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.

Im Spatmittelalter bildete sich ein transmediterranes Netzwerk von Heiligen Orten, die mit der Seefahrt verbunden waren und sich durch ihre Lage am symbolischen Treffpunkt zwischen Meer, Land und Himmel hervorhoben. Die Aufsatze diese Bandes beschreiben die besondere Sakralgeographie der entlang der mittelalterlichen Seewege gelegenen Heiligtumer und erforschen deren Charakteristiken aus historischer, religions- und kunstgeschichtlicher Sicht."

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.

Wegen des grossen Umfangs wird der Kommentar zu Hippokrates, der hier erstmalig vollstandig und mit einer modernen, englischen UEbersetzung publiziert wird, in drei Banden herausgeben. Nach dem 1985 in derselben Reihe veroeffentlichten 1. Teil erscheint nun Band 2 der Ausgabe.

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.