Modern theoretical approaches throw new light on the concepts of face and faciality in the Roman de la Rose and other French texts from the Middle Ages. In medieval French literature, faces feature heavily as markers of identity, mood, class, status, and even humanity. The information that they convey can be strategically concealed and revealed, but they are always understood to be legible. This book explores the face as a medieval literary motif and as a modern phenomenon, charting its limits and interrogating the idea of face as a universal signifier. It examines what happens when faces are not legible, when they are found on non-human surfaces, and when they migrate across the human body. It looks at faciality in a series of texts from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, moving from Arthurian tales, through the Roman de la Rose to the fabliaux, as well as examining fourteenth-century manuscripts in which faces appear as disembodied doodles. Reading these texts in conjunction with twentieth-century theories of face and faciality, and considering the ideas behind twenty-first-century face recognition technology, this book argues that faces in the popular imagination tell us less about identity than they do about how we understand and interact with the world around us.

The questions of fame and reputation are central to Chaucer's writings; the essays here discuss their various treatments and manifestations. Fama, or fame, is a central concern of late medieval literature: where fame came from, who deserved it, whether it was desirable and how it was acquired and kept. An interest in fame was not new but was renewed and rethought within the vernacular revolutions of the later Middle Ages. The work of Geoffrey Chaucer collates received ideas on the subject of fama, both from the classical world and from the work of his contemporaries. Chaucer's place in these intertextual negotiations was readily recognized in his aftermath, as later writers adopted and reworked postures which Chaucer had struck, in their own bids for literary authority. This volume tracks debates onfama which were past, present and future to Chaucer, using his work as a centre point to investigate canon formation in European literature from the late Middle Ages and into the Early Modern period. Isabel Davis is Senior Lecturer in Medieval Literature at Birkbeck, University of London; Catherine Nall is Senior Lecturer in Medieval Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. Contributors: Joanna Bellis, Alcuin Blamires, Julia Boffey, Isabel Davis, Stephanie Downes, A.S.G. Edwards, Jamie C. Fumo, Andrew Galloway, Nick Havely, Thomas A. Prendergast, Mike Rodman Jones, William T. Rossiter, Elizaveta Strakhov.

Although scholars continue to address old questions about Polybius, it is clear that they are also turning their attention to aspects of his history that have been inadequately dealt with in the past or have even gone largely unnoticed. Polybius' history is increasingly treated not just as a source of valuable information on the impressive expansion of Roman rule in the Mediterranean world, but also as a complex and nuanced narrative with its own interests and purposes. Moreover, since (apart from Livy's use of Polybius, which has been thoroughly discussed) most studies of Polybius' reception focus on the modern world, especially in relation to the theory of mixed constitutions, finding out more about Polybius' impact on ancient Greek and Roman authors remains a major desideratum. This volume brings together contributions which, in either posing new questions or reformulating old ones, attest both to the ardent scholarly interest currently directed toward Polybius and to the variety of hermeneutical issues raised by his work. Subjects discussed include Polybius' historical ideas, his methods of composition, his views on the role of the historian, his representation of cultural difference, his intertextual affinities, and his reception and influence. Taken together, the papers in this collection attempt to promote a deeper understanding of the qualities and peculiarities of Polybius' history, as well as to offer fresh insights into the interpretation of this important work.

This book explores the answers to fundamental questions about the human mind and human behaviour with the help of two ancient texts. The first is Oedipus Rex (Oedipus Tyrannus) by Sophocles, written in the 5th century BCE. The second is human DNA, with its origins around 4 billion years ago, and continuously revised by chance and evolution. With Sophocles as a guide, the authors take a journey into the Genomic era, an age marked by ever-expanding insights into the human genome. Over the course of this journey, the book explores themes of free will, fate, and chance; prediction, misinterpretation, and the burden that comes with knowledge of the future; self-fulfilling and self-defeating prophecies; the forces that contribute to similarities and differences among people; roots and lineage; and the judgement of oneself and others. Using Oedipus Rex as its lens, this novel work provides an engaging overview of behavioural genetics that demonstrates its relevance across the humanities and the social and life sciences. It will appeal in particular to students and scholars of genetics, education, psychology, sociology, and law.

What makes a demagogue? A much more friendly touch, or more importantly, a perception of a friendly touch, than has previously been explored. Demagogues, Power and Friendship in Classical Athens examines the ways in which a demagogic leadership style based on personal connection became ingrained in this period, drawing on close study of several genres of literature of the late 5th and early-to-mid 4th centuries BCE. Such connection was particularly effective with lower classes of Athenians, who had been accustomed to being excluded from politicians' friendship-based approaches to coalition-building. Comedies of Aristophanes (particularly Knights), tragedies of Euripides (particularly Iphigenia in Aulis), and historical biographies of Xenophon (particularly Anabasis and Cyropaedia) depict demagogues, or characters exhibiting demagogic characteristics, using a style of outreach to members of neglected classes that involved provoking feelings of friendship with individuals in these classes, whether the demagogues and individual supporters actually interacted closely or not. These leaders employed techniques, such as propinquity, homophily, and transitivity, that both contemporary sociologists (and, in some cases, Aristotle) recognize as effective for such purposes. Particular attention is paid to discrepancies in Aristophanes' Knights between how the demagogue Cleon is hyperbolically portrayed (as a pederastic lover of the Athenian people) and how his language and actions make him out - as a friend of theirs, as he likely portrayed himself.

This book provides a comprehensive study of the Certamen Homeri et Hesiodi, an influential ancient Greek text that narrates the lives of Homer and Hesiod and their legendary poetic contest. It offers new perspectives on the nature, uses, and legacy of the text and its tale of literary competition. Located within a recent trend in scholarship that treats ancient biographies as modes of literary reception, the first chapter discusses how, for authors throughout antiquity and beyond, staging an imaginary competition between Homer and Hesiod was an adaptable and flexible way to convey a diverse range of speculations on epic poetry. The study of the manuscript tradition reassesses the relationships between the text of the Certamen preserved in its entirety in one single manuscript, and a small number of fragmentary witnesses on papyrus. It also presents new textual evidence demonstrating the success and circulation of the text in the Renaissance, and a new critical edition with translation. The commentary focuses on how the text characterises the two poets and encourages reflection on their respective wisdom, aesthetic and ethical values, divine inspiration, and Panhellenic appeal. It also addresses the role of Alcidamas as a source for the Certamen and identifies other sophistic influences.

The book is an analysis of Greek Hellenistic literature with the help of conceptual tools of cultural studies and media theory. Its main aim is to describe the cultural process during which Greek authors in the 4th and 3rd centuries B.C. made the "textualization of experience", that is, transferred phenomenalistically understood qualities of human sensory experience to the categories characteristic for textual description - as far as possible for them. This process is shown by examples from the works of Xenophon, Aristotle, Theophrastus, Philitas of Kos and Archimedes. The author also tries to show some of the consequences that the phenomenon of the Hellenistic textualization of experience had for the later epochs of European culture.

Since at least 1939, when daily-strip caveman Alley Oop time-traveled to the Trojan War, comics have been drawing (on) material from Greek and Roman myth, literature and history. At times the connection is cosmetic-as perhaps with Wonder Woman's Amazonian heritage-and at times it is almost irrelevant-as with Hercules' starfaring adventures in the 1982 Marvel miniseries. But all of these make implicit or explicit claims about the place of classics in modern literary culture.
Classics and Comics is the first book to explore the engagement of classics with the epitome of modern popular literature, the comic book. This volume collects sixteen articles, all specially commissioned for this volume, that look at how classical content is deployed in comics and reconfigured for a modern audience. It opens with a detailed historical introduction surveying the role of classical material in comics since the 1930s. Subsequent chapters cover a broad range of topics, including the incorporation of modern theories of myth into the creation and interpretation of comic books, the appropriation of characters from classical literature and myth, and the reconfiguration of motif into a modern literary medium. Among the well-known comics considered in the collection are Frank Miller's 300 and Sin City, DC Comics' Wonder Woman, Jack Kirby's The Eternals, Neil Gaiman's Sandman, and examples of Japanese manga. The volume also includes an original 12-page "comics-essay," drawn and written by Eisner Award-winning Eric Shanower, creator of the graphic novel series Age of Bronze.

New essays on aspects of Gower's poetry, viewed through the lens of the self and beyond. The topics of "selfhood" and "otherness" lie at the heart of these new assessments of John Gower's poetry. The first part of the book, on knowing the self and others, focuses on cognition, brain functions, imagination, and the internal and external factors that affect one's sense of being, from sensation and inner emotive effects within body parts to cosmic perspectives, morality, and theology as voiced by language and storytelling. The second, on the essence of strangers, explores the interconnections of sensation and aesthetics; it also considers kinds of social dysfunction, whether through racial or gender conflict, or religious and political warfare.The final part of the booklooks at social ethics and ethical poets, reassessing two of Gower's perpetual concerns: honest government and honest craft. It considers Gower as a constitutional thinker, whether in terms of law, judicial corruption, or a society of businessmen who would rewrite ethics in terms of business models. It concludes with an examination of the Confessio in the culture of Portugal and Spain. Russell Peck is the John Hall Deane Professor of English at the University of Rochester: R. F. Yeager is Professor of English at the University of West Florida. Contributors: Stephanie L. Batkie, Helen Cooper, Brian W. Gastle, Matthew Giancarlo, Matthew W. Irvin, Yoshiko Kobayashi, Robert J. Meindl, Peter Nicholson, Maura Nolan, Gabrielle Parkin, Russell A. Peck, Ana Saez-Hidalgo, Larry Scanlon, Karla Taylor, Kim Zarins, R.F. Yeager,

In Plato's Socrates on Socrates: Socratic Self-Disclosure and the Public Practice of Philosophy, Anne-Marie Schultz analyzes the philosophical and political implications of Plato's presentation of Socrates' self-disclosive speech in four dialogues: Theaetetus, Symposium, Apology, and Phaedo. Schultz argues that these moments of Socratic self-disclosure show that Plato's presentation of "Socrates the narrator" is much more pervasive than the secondary literature typically acknowledges. Despite the pervasive appearance of a Socrates who describes his own experience throughout the dialogues, Socratic autobiographical self-disclosure has received surprisingly little scholarly attention. Plato's use of narrative, particularly his trope of "Socrates the narrator," is often subsumed into discussions of the dramatic nature of the dialogues more generally rather than studied in its own right. Schultz shows how these carefully crafted narrative remarks add to the richness and profundity of the Platonic texts on multiple levels. To illustrate how these embedded Socratic narratives contribute to the portrait of Socrates as a public philosopher in Plato's dialogues, the author also examines Socratic self-disclosive practices in the works of bell hooks, Kathy Khang, and Ta-Neishi Coates, and even practices the art of Socratic self-disclosure herself.

The Irrational Augustine takes the notion of St Augustine as rigid and dogmatic Father of the Church and turns it on its head. Catherine Conybeare reads Augustine's earliest works to discover the anti-dogmatic Augustine, who values changeability and human interconnectedness and deplores social exclusion. The novelty of her book lies in taking seriously the nature of these early works as performances, through which multiple questions can be raised and multiple options explored, both in words and through their dramatic framework. The theological consequences are considerable. A very human Augustine emerges, talking and playing with friends and family, including his mother - and a very sympathetic set of ideas is the result.

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.

The use of significant proper names is one of the most entertaining aspects of Aristophanes' art; unsurprisingly, it has received much scholarly attention. But although there are a large number of articles and scattered comments on individual names, the present book offers the first systematic study on the subject. It is, as far as possible, an exhaustive discussion of significant proper names that appear in Aristophanes' eleven extant plays: personal names (which occupy the largest part), theonyms, place-names, ethnics and demotics - all names that seem to be deliberately used for their meanings. Two appendixes discuss slave-names and selected names from Aristophanes' fragmentary plays. Names are carefully analysed in their context, taking into account a range of factors such as language (etymology and word-plays), the content of the plays (the plots, set against their political and social background), and issues of characterisation. This work is thus meant to contribute simultaneously to Aristophanic scholarship, by enabling a deeper appreciation of Aristophanes ' humour, and to the field of Greek literary onomastics.

Contemporary translation studies have explored translation not as a means of recovering a source text, but as a process of interpretation and production of literary meaning and value. Translation and the Classic uses this idea to discuss the relationship between translation and the classic text. It proposes a framework in which 'the classic' figures less as an autonomous entity than as the result of the interplay between source text and translation practice and examines the consequences of this hypothesis for questioning established definitions of the classic: how does translation mediate the social, political and national uses of 'the classics' in the contemporary global context of changing canons and traditions? The volume contains a total of eighteen original essays, plus an introduction, written by scholars working in classics and classical reception, translation studies, literary theory, comparative literature, theatre and performance studies, history and philosophy and makes a potent contribution to pressing debates in all of these areas.

The first-of-its-kind, Games and Gaming in Medieval Literature explores the depth and breadth of games in medieval literature and culture. Chapters span from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, and cover England, France, Denmark, Poland, and Spain, re-examining medieval games in diverse social settings such as the church, court, and household.

A follow-up publication to the Handbook of Medieval Studies, this new reference work turns to a different focus: medieval culture. Medieval research has grown tremendously in depth and breadth over the last decades. Particularly our understanding of medieval culture, of the basic living conditions, and the specific value system prevalent at that time has considerably expanded, to a point where we are in danger of no longer seeing the proverbial forest for the trees. The present, innovative handbook offers compact articles on essential topics, ideals, specific knowledge, and concepts defining the medieval world as comprehensively as possible. The topics covered in this new handbook pertain to issues such as love and marriage, belief in God, hell, and the devil, education, lordship and servitude, Christianity versus Judaism and Islam, health, medicine, the rural world, the rise of the urban class, travel, roads and bridges, entertainment, games, and sport activities, numbers, measuring, the education system, the papacy, saints, the senses, death, and money.

Survey of one of the most important surviving medieval manuscripts reveals much of its contemporary cultural, literary and social milieu. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 264 is one of the most famous and most sumptuous illuminated manuscripts of the entire Middle Ages. Completed in 1344 in Tournai, in what is now Belgium, the manuscript preserves the fullest version of the interpolated Old French Roman d'Alexandre (Romance of Alexander the Great), and some of the most vivid illustrations of any medieval romance, ranking amongst the greatest achievements of the illuminator's art, its borders in particular offering a panorama of medieval society and imagination. A celebration of courtliness, a commemoration of urban chivalry, a mirror for the prince instructing in the arts of rule, and a meditation on crusade, it manifests the extraordinary richness and creativity of late medieval manuscript culture. This study examines the manuscript as a monumental expression of the beliefs and social practices of its day, placing it in its historical and artistic context; it also analyzes its later reception in England, where the addition of a Middle English Alexander poem and of Marco Polo's Voyages reflects changing concepts of language, historiography, and geography. Mark Cruse is Assistant Professor of French, School of International Letters and Cultures, Arizona State University.

This volume brings together contemporary popular entertainment, current political subjects, & medieval history & culture to investigate the intersecting & often tangled relations between politics, aesthetics, reality & fiction, in relation to issues of morality, identity, social values, power, & justice, both in the past & in the present.

Although ancient hope has attracted much scholarly attention in the past, this is the first book-length discussion of the topic. The introduction offers a systematic discussion of the semantics of Greek elpis and Latin spes and addresses the difficult question of whether hope -ancient and modern- is an emotion. On the other hand, the 16 contributions deal with specific aspects of hope in Greek and Latin literature, history and art, including Pindar's poetry, Greek tragedy, Thucydides, Virgil's epic and Tacitus' Historiae. The volume also explores from a historical perspective the hopes of slaves in antiquity, the importance of hope for the enhancement of stereotypes about the barbarians, and the depiction of hope in visual culture, providing thereby a useful tool not only for classicist but also for philosophers, cultural historians and political scientists.

How does one construct a role for oneself in the fourth-century democratic city? This commentary on Isocrates' Antidosis , which includes a full translation as well as an extensive introduction, demonstrates that a rhetorician may do so by assuming roles that subvert many of the conventions invoked by the genre - a non-speaker in a rhetorical community, a rhetorician in a world where rhetorical performativity has derogatory connotations, a philosopher following the trial of Socrates. Moreover, Yun Lee Too demonstrates how the narrative of 'self' in the Antidosis is to be understood as a sophisticated amalgam of literary, rhetorical, philosophical, and legal discourses.

Byzantine Ecocriticism: Women, Nature, and Power in the Medieval Greek Romance applies literary ecocriticism to the imaginative fiction of the Greek world from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries. Through analyses of hunting, gardening, bride-stealing, and warfare, Byzantine Ecocriticism exposes the attitudes and behaviors that justified human control over women, nature, and animals; the means by which such control was exerted; and the anxieties surrounding its limits. Adam Goldwyn thus demonstrates the ways in which intersectional ecocriticism, feminism, and posthumanism can be applied to medieval texts, and illustrates how the legacies of medieval and Byzantine environmental practice and ideology continue to be relevant to contemporary ecological and environmental concerns.

Incest was a social problem in the Middle Ages, and also a popular literary theme. This wide-ranging study is the first survey of medieval incest stories in their cultural context. Did they reflect real life situations? How was incest defined in the Middle Ages? How were classical incest stories treated by medieval writers? Why was incest such a popular motif in the legendary lives of popes and saints, and why was it inserted into the stories of great heroes such as Charlemagne and Arthur?

This new edition corrects shortcomings of earlier editions by providing a text which incorporates neglected or unavailable material from Greek manuscripts, recently published papyri, and quotations from the orations by rhetoricians dating from antiquity through to the Byzantine period. All this information is presented in notes in Greek and Latin, which will not only allow convenient access to evidence for the text but will also provide references to ancient and medieval interpretations of the orations.

The Council of Constantinople of 869-70 was highly dramatic, with its trial and condemnation of Patriarch Photius, a towering figure in the Byzantium of his day, and the tussle of wills at the council between the papal legates, the imperial representatives and the bishops. It was church politics and personalities rather than issues of doctrine, such as icon veneration, that dominated the debates. Out of all the acts of the great early councils, the acts of this council, of which this edition is the first modern translation, are the nearest to an accurate and complete record. Its protest against secular interference in ecclesiastical elections was taken up later in the West and led to this council's being accorded full ecumenical status, although it had been repudiated in Byzantium soon after it was held. No early council expresses so vividly the tension between Rome's claim to supreme authority and the Byzantine reduction of this to a primacy of honour.

This first volume in the new Palgrave Literary Dictionaries series aims to provide readers with a convenient source of reliable, scholarly, and accessible information on Chaucer's work, life, and times. It consists mainly of alphabetical entries, ranging in length from 10 to 3,000 words. These cover topics and issues, including Chaucer's works, major fictional characters, historical, social, and political contexts, writers who influenced Chaucer or were influenced by him, people and places of significance in Chaucer's life, genres and traditions, manuscripts, editions, scholars and editors.