This book looks at witnesses to suffering and death in ancient Greek epic (Homer's Iliad) and tragedy. Internal spectators abound in both genres, and have received due scholarly attention. The present monograph covers new ground by dealing with a specific subset of characters: those who are put in the position of spectator to (and, often, commentator on) their own deed(s). By their very nature, protagonists are confined to the role of witness to the suffering (or deaths) they have caused only for brief stretches of time - often a single scene or even just the length of a speech - but every instance is of central importance, not just to our understanding of the characters in question, but also to the articulation of fundamental themes within the poetic works under examination. As they shift from the status of agent to that of witness, these protagonists, qua spectators to the consequences of their actions, give voice to, dramatize, and enact the tragic motifs of human helplessness and mortal fallibility that lie at the core of Homeric epic and Greek tragedy and that define the human condition, in a manner that leads the audience looking on to ponder their own.

The vital index to all previous volumes, I-X; plus new research. Epitomises what is best in Arthurian scholarship today.ZEITSCHRIFT FUR ROMANISCHE PHILOLOGIE Arthurian Literatureis now established as a leading publication for research articles of monograph length on subjects of perennial interest to Arthurians. The Indexto the first ten volumes, representing the years 1980-1990, will be warmly welcomed by Arthurians and other scholars with an interest in medieval and later literature. Additionally an extended biographical essay by JANET GRAYSON draws together material relating to the life and work of Jessie Weston, who, largely working outside the mainstream of scholarly tradition, exercised a powerful influence on Arthurian studies. The regular "Update" feature catalogues Arthurian legend in the fine and applied art of the 19th and early 20th centuries, contributed by ROGER SIMPSON.

This is an insight into the rich cultural canvas of the Middle Ages is granted by a host of texts: liturgical manuals; manuscripts of epic poetry, vernacular lyric, and music; paintings, and many more. Adopting a wide range of disciplinary perspectives-literary studies, liturgical studies, iconography, and musicology - this collection of essays reveals the two-fold performative nature of such texts: they document, mediate, or prefigure acts of performance, while at the same time taking on performative roles themselves by generating additional layers of meaning. Focussing on acts, authors, and receptive processes of performance, the authors demonstrate the significance of the performative to the culture of the High and Late Middle Ages (c.1000-1500), from chant to Chaucer, from Scandinavia to Imperial Augsburg.

This is the second volume on the mechanisms of oral communication in ancient Greece, focused on epic poetry, a genre with deep roots in orality. Considering the critical debate about orality and its influence on the composition, diffusion and transmission of the archaic epic poems, the survey provides a reconsideration and a reassessment of the traces of orality in the archaic epic poetry, following their adaptation in the synchronic and diachronic changes of the communicative system. Combining the methods of cognitive science, and the historical and literary analysis of the texts, the research explores the complexity of the literary message of the Greek epic poetry, highlighting its position in a system of oral communication. The consideration of structural and formal aspects, i.e. the traces of orality in the narrative architecture, in the epic diction, in the meter and the formulaic system, as well as the vestiges of the mixture of orality and writing, allows to reconstruct a dynamic frame of communicative modalities which influenced and enriched the archaic epic poetry, providing it with expressive potentialities destined to a longlasting permanence in the history of the genre.

Transforming Tales argues that the study of transformation is crucial for understanding a wide range of canonical work in medieval French literature. From the lais and Arthurian romances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, through the Roman de la Rose and its widespread influence, to the fourteenth-century Ovide moralise and the vast prose cycles of the late Middle Ages, metamorphosis is a recurrent theme, resulting in some of the best-known and most powerful literature of the era. Transforming Tales is the first book in English to explore in detail the importance of ideas of metamorphosis in French literature from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. This book's purpose is twofold: it traces a series of figures (the werewolf, the snake-woman, the nymph, the magician, amongst others) as they are transformed within individual texts; and it also examines the way in which the stories of transformation themselves become rewritten during the course of the Middle Ages. Griffin's approach combines close readings and comparisons of literary texts with readings informed by modern critical theories which are grounded in many of the ideas raised by medieval metamorphosis: the body, gender, identity and categories of life. Literary depictions and reworkings of transformation raise questions about medieval understandings of the differences between human and animal, man and woman, God and man, life and death-these are the questions explored in Transforming Tales.

Although it is often thought that Herodotus is a simple author, and that his Histories do not contain many passages requiring textual criticism, closer investigation reveals this view to be inaccurate. Written to accompany and augment the new Oxford Classical Texts edition of the Histories - which has been substantially revised by Nigel Wilson from the original edition by Danish scholar C. Hude in 1906 - this volume attempts to take account of discussion of numerous passages where there is reason to question whether the text as transmitted in ancient or medieval manuscripts is exactly what the author intended. A wide range of conjectures is represented, and work by scholars whose contributions have been neglected or insufficiently appreciated, in particular J. V. Pingel, H. Richards, and J. E. Powell, is taken into account.

The Records of Mazu and the Making of Classical Chan Literature explores the growth, makeup, and transformation of Chan (Zen) Buddhist literature in late medieval China. The volume analyzes the earliest extant records about the life, teachings, and legacy of Mazu Daoyi (709-788), the famous leader of the Hongzhou School and one of the principal figures in Chan history. While some of the texts covered are well-known and form a central part of classical Chan (or more broadly Buddhist) literature in China, others have been largely ignored, forgotten, or glossed over until recently. Poceski presents a range of primary materials important for the historical study of Chan Buddhism, some translated for the first time into English or other Western language. He surveys the distinctive features and contents of particular types of texts, and analyzes the forces, milieus, and concerns that shaped key processes of textual production during this period. Although his main focus is on written sources associated with a celebrated Chan tradition that developed and rose to prominence during the Tang era (618-907), Poceski also explores the Five Dynasties (907-960) and Song (960-1279) periods, when many of the best-known Chan collections were compiled. Exploring the Chan School's creative adaptation of classical literary forms and experimentation with novel narrative styles, The Records of Mazu and the Making of Classical Chan Literature traces the creation of several distinctive Chan genres that exerted notable influence on the subsequent development of Buddhism in China and the rest of East Asia.

This book makes the compelling argument that Chaucer, the "Perle"-poet, and "The Cloud of Unknowing" author exploited analogue and metaphor for marking out the pedagogical gap between science and the imagination. These writers take up an Aristotelian confidence in reason as a proof model for works of the imagination. St. Augustine, too, had argued persuasively that we might well train ourselves "to discern in the light of reason what we] already hold by faith." By the 12th century, John of Salisbury, in his "Metalogicon," had argued that "sensation is the progenitor of science." Chaucer, the "Perle"-poet, and the author of "The Cloud of Unknowing" set out models for such instruction--for seeing from the center--as they map the pedagogical energy of the browsing imagination. Here, Linda Tarte Holley adds definition to arguments that still gain our attention and energies in the twenty-first century.

This book investigates the economic organization of ancient societies from a comparative perspective. By pursuing an interdisciplinary approach, including contributions by archaeologists, historians of antiquity, economic historians as well as historians of economic thought, it studies various aspects of ancient economies, such as the material living conditions including production technologies, etc.; economic institutions such as markets and coinage; as well as the economic thinking of the time. In the process, it also explores the comparability of economic thought, economic institutions and economic systems in ancient history. Focusing on the Ancient Near East as well as the Mediterranean, including Greece and Rome, this comparative perspective makes it possible to identify historical permanencies, but also diverse forms of social and political organization and cultural systems. These institutions are then evaluated in terms of their capacity to solve economic problems, such as the efficient use of resources or political stability. The first part of the book introduces readers to the methodological context of the comparative approach, including an evaluation of the related historiographical tradition. Subsequent parts discuss a range of development models, elements of economic thinking in ancient societies, the role of trade and globalization, and the use of monetary and financial instruments, as well as political aspects.

Explores the myriad ways in which alchemy was conceptualised by adepts and sceptics alike, from those with recourse to a fully functioning laboratory to those who did not know their pelican from their athanor! The language of alchemy (the art of transmuting metals and manufacturing pharmaceutical medicine) is defined by obscure imagery, authorial play and dense knottiness, tempting curious readers to unpick its impenetrable promises. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, alchemical literature was read, interpreted and reimagined both by those with recourse to a fully functioning laboratory and those who did not know their pelican from their athanor. Recent studies by historians of science have succeeded in decoding the difficult language of these texts, revealing the replicable chemical procedures behind their metaphors. However, as a literary investigation of alchemy, this book explores more fluid understandings of the art in the period. Through an analysis of medieval and early modern texts and manuscript cultures, the volume explores the myriad ways in which alchemy was conceptualised in this period, by adept and sceptic alike. From Geoffrey Chaucer's mockery of the impotence of alchemical 'pryvetee' in The Canterbury Tales, and John Gower's macrocosmic hope for societal amelioration in the Confessio Amantis, to Elias Ashmole's angelic alchemy in the Theatrum chemicum britannicum, it explores the natural philosophy that underpinned such diverse representations of this 'slidynge science', proffering a theory of 'alchemical hermeneutics' as a conspiratorial way of reading that sees alchemy in all.

The Secret in Medieval Literature: Alternative Worlds in the Middle Ages explores the many strange phenomena, both in the Middle Ages and today, that do not find any good rational explanations. Those do not pertain to magic or to religion in the traditional sense of the word; they are secrets of an epistemological kind and tend to defy human rationality, without being marginal or irrelevant. At first sight, we might believe that we face elements from fairy tales, but the medieval cases discussed here go far beyond such a simplistic approach to the mysterious dimension of secrets. In fact, as this book argues, medieval poets commonly engaged with alternative forces and described their workings within the human context (both in the Latin West and in the East), without being able to come to terms with them critically. Those mysteries appear both in heroic epics and courtly romances, among other genres, and they figure more frequently than we might have assumed. On the one hand, we could conceive of those secrets as the product of literary liberties and imagination; on the other, those secrets prove to be rather serious agents intervening in the lives of the fictional protagonists. By the same token, our modern world is not all rationality and material conditions either. The study of secrets in the Middle Ages thus opens the pathway toward a new epistemology both for the people in the pre-modern age and us today.

Written by one of the leading critics in medieval studies, this new book explores the representations of madness in medieval French literature. Drawing on a range of modern psychoanalytic theories and an impressive range of texts from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, Sylvia Huot focuses on the relationship between madness and identity, both personal and collective, and demonstrates the cultural significance of madness in the Middle Ages.

This book is the first comprehensive study of the reception of classical Greece among English aesthetic writers of the nineteenth century. By exploring this history of reception, the book aims to give readers a new and fuller understanding of literary aestheticism, its intellectual contexts, and its challenges to mainstream Victorian culture.

The textual foundations of works of great cultural significance are often less stable than one would wish them to be. No work of Homer, Dante or Shakespeare survives in utterly reliable witnesses, be they papyri, manuscripts or printed editions. Notions of textual authority have varied considerably across the ages under the influence of different (and differently motivated) agents, such as scribes, annotators, editors, correctors, grammarians, printers and publishers, over and above the authors themselves. The need for preserving the written legacy of peoples and nations as faithfully as possible has always been counterbalanced by a duty to ensure its accessibility to successive generations at different times and in different cultural contexts. The ten chapters collected in this volume offer critical approaches to such authors and texts as Homer, the Bible, The Thousand and One Nights, Dante, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Eliot, but also Leonardo da Vinci's manuscripts uniquely combining word and image, as well as Beethoven's 'Tempest' sonata (Op. 31, No. 2) as seen from the angle of music as text. Together the contributors argue that an awareness of what the 'life of texts' entails is essential for a critical understanding of the transmission of culture.

A new view of King Rother in which not only the wooer but also his bride-to-be enacts a quest. King Rother, a twelfth-century bridal-quest epic, occupies an important place in the history of German literature. The earliest surviving and structurally most sophisticated of the so-called minstrel epics, verse narrativesonce assumed to have been recited by itinerant minstrels before a courtly audience, it has its roots in German folklore and documents the transition from orality to the culture of the book. The text belongs to the subgenre of theperilous bridal quest, in which the disguised wooer deceives the bride's father and abducts her with her consent. This simple quest structure is doubled, if the wooer must win his bride a second time from her father, who has rescued her. The bride is almost always a passive figure in these events, the main conflict being the disparity in status between the wooer and his prospective father-in-law. King Rother is structurally complex, as the presentstudy is the first to recognize: the quest structure is doubled not only in the wooer's second quest, but also in the bride's own actions -- including her use of deception in a parallel quest for her wooer. This underscores her equality in status, which is her essential qualification to be his wife. The study includes an important English-language summary of scholarship on King Rother, on the minstrel epics, and on the bridal quest. Thomas Kerth is Associate Professor of German at Stony Brook University.

Throughout Antiquity and the Middle Ages, literature was read with the ear as much as with the eye: silent reading was the exception; audible reading, the norm. This highly original book shows that Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy - one of the most widely-read texts in Western history - aims to affect the listener through the designs of its rhythmic sound. Stephen Blackwood argues that the Consolation's metres are arranged in patterns that have a therapeutic and liturgical purpose: as a bodily mediation of the text's consolation, these rhythmic patterns enable the listener to discern the eternal in the motion of time. The Consolation of Boethius as Poetic Liturgy vividly explores how in this acoustic encounter with the text philosophy becomes a lived reality, and reading a kind of prayer.

A comprehensive guide to the medieval popular romance, one of the age's most important literary forms. Popular romance was one of the most wide-spread forms of literature in the middle ages, yet despite its cultural centrality, and its fundamental importance for later literary developments, the genre has defied precise definition,its subject matter ranging from tales of chivalric adventure, to saintly women, and monsters who become human. The essays in this collection seek to provide an inclusive and thorough examination of romance. They provide contexts,definitions, and explanations for the genre, particularly in, but not limited to, an English context. Topics covered include genre and literary classification; race and ethnicity; gender; orality and performance; the romance and young readers; metre and form; printing culture; and reception. CONTRIBUTORS: ROSALIND FIELD, RALUCA L. RADULESCU, MALDWYN MILLS, GILLIAN ROGERS, JENNIFER FELLOWS, THOMAS H. CROFTS, ROBERT ALLEN ROUSE, JOANNE CHARBONNEAU,DESIREE CROMWELL, AD PUTTER, KARL REICHL, PHILLIPA HARDMAN, CORY JAMES RUSHTON

Detailed textual analysis of the tales by the Miller, Nun's Priest, the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner, as well as the General Prologue invites you to sharpen your critical faculties, extend your knowledge and engage with the text itself in order to fully appreciate the work of this fascinating, complex and surprisingly modern writer. Whether you consider yourself an expert or a student, this study has something for you as it demonstrates the various approaches which can be used to learn about style, structure, multiple voices and the key themes of Chaucer's work. It offers a careful support and thoughtful framework upon which to base your own analysis and challenging you to form your own ideas and opinions.

This handbook is a guide to the reading of elegiac, iambic, personal and public poetry of early Greece. Intended as a teaching manual or as an aid for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, it presents the major scholarly debates affecting the reading of these poetic texts, such as the effect of genre, the question of the poetic persona, or the impact of modern literary theory.

Early Greek Relative Clauses contributes to an old debate currently enjoying a revival: should we expect languages spoken a few thousand years ago, such as Proto-Indo-European, to be less well-equipped than modern languages when it comes to subordinate clauses? Early Greek relative clauses provide a test case for this problem. Early Greek uses several kinds of relative clause, but all these are usually thought to come from one, or at most two, prehistoric types. In a new look at the evidence, this book finds that a rich variety of relative clause types has been in place for a considerable time. The reconstruction of prehistoric linguistic stages requires detailed work on the individual languages descending from them. A substantial part of the book is therefore devoted to a new look at the relative clause systems found in a wide variety of early Greek texts. It emerges that the same basic system is in use across all these texts. Different kinds of relative clause predominate in different kinds of text, however, because relative clause syntax and semantics interact with the needs of different kinds of text. Considering material as diverse as the Homeric poems, laws inscribed in stone on the island of Crete, and the philosophical prose of Heraclitus, the discussion remains clear and straightforward as Probert considers the uses and histories of different relative clause types.

A fresh and sympathetic investigation of the depiction of wolves in early medieval literature, recuperating their reputation. The best-known wolves of Old English literature are the Beasts of Battle, alongside ravens and eagles as ravenous heralds of doom who haunt the battlefield in the hope of fresh meat plucked from still-warm bodies. Yet to reduce these animals to mere corpse-scavengers is to deny that they are frequently imbued with a variety of far more nuanced meanings elsewhere in the corpus. Two such meanings are inherited from ancient and medieval European lupine motifs: the superstition that the wolf could steal a person's speech, and the perceived contiguous natures of wolves and human outlaws. Tracing the history of these associations and the evidence to suggest that they were known to writers working in early medieval England, this book provides new, animal-centric readings of Wulf and Eadwacer, Abbo of Fleury and AElfric's Passiones Eadmundi, and Beowulf, placing these texts within a lupine literary network that transcends time and place. By exploring the intricate, contradictory, and even sympathetic depictions of the wolves and wolf-like entities found within these texts, this book banishes all notions of the medieval wolf as the one-dimensional, man-eating creature that it is so often understood to be.

Ibn Bagga's commentary on Aristotle's On Generation and Corruption (Kitab al-Kawn wa-l-fasad, Latin De generatione et corruptione) is one of the first commentaries to elaborate on the essential aspect of Aristotle's text, that is, the analysis of change ( , tagayyur). The commentary's extant parts comprise a consecutive exposition of the contents of Aristotle's work. However, the commentary may be read more as an introduction or a guide to the topic of generation than as a substitution for the original, as the paraphrases by Averroes seem to have become in the later tradition. The present study provides a new critical edition of the Arabic text and, for the first time, an English translation and a study of the structure of the commentary on the basis of the only two known manuscripts.

Rome, Polybius, and the East offers a collection of seventeen of the more important papers written by the late Peter Derow, Hody Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History at Wadham College, Oxford, during the course of his career. With a detailed introduction by the editors, the papers make up a distinctive and influential body of work-essential reading for anyone interested in Roman imperialism or Polybius, and Rome's rise to Mediterranean power. They include Derow's classic survey articles on the Roman conquest of the East, the great Greek historian Polybius, his investigations of the Roman calendar, and several papers on epigraphy. It also contains a bibliography of Derow's work.

The Russian reception of the greatest Roman poet, Vergil, provided Russian thinkers with a way in which to define Russian-European features. This volume looks to uncover the nature of Russian reception of Vergil, and argues that the best way to analyse his presence in Russian letters is to view it in the context of the formation and development of Russian national and literary identity.
Russian reception of Vergil began to play an integral role in the eighteenth century -- starting with the reforms of Peter the Great -- and continued to be an important point of reference for Russian writers well into the last part of the twentieth century. At the beginning of the twentieth century, it took on a spiritual, almost messianic mission, while towards the end of the millennium the post-modernist Vergil of Joseph Brodsky contemplated the fate of a poet in the world. However, Russian reception of Vergil offers significantly more than mere foreign importation or imitation of the beliefs and attitudes towards Vergil developed in Europe. It provides a gateway to understanding Russian eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thought about national identity and values, and uncovers important sources of later thinking about the character and destiny of Russia. Vergil in Russia reveals that at the centre of Russian reception of Vergil is Russia's challenge to define the character and validity of their own civilization. Vergil's poems, especially the Aeneid, gave Russian men of letters an opportunity to think about and act upon national self-determination in both political and cultural terms.