This volume investigates the history and nature of pain in Greek culture under the Roman Empire (50-250 CE). Traditional accounts of pain in this society have focused either on philosophical or medical theories of pain or on Christian notions of 'suffering'; fascination with the pained body has often been assumed to be a characteristic of Christian society, rather than Imperial culture in general. This book employs tools from contemporary cultural and literary theory to examine the treatment of pain in a range of central cultural discourses from the first three centuries of the Empire, including medicine, religious writing, novelistic literature, and rhetorical ekphrasis. It argues instead that pain was approached from an holistic perspective: rather than treating pain as a narrowly defined physiological perception, it was conceived as a type of embodied experience in which ideas about the body's physiology, the representation and articulation of its perceptions, as well as the emotional and cognitive impact of pain were all important facets of what it meant to be in pain. By bringing this conception to light, scholars are able to redefine our understanding of the social and emotional fabric of Imperial society and help to reposition its relationship with the emergence of Christian society in late antiquity.

This volume provides a combined index to the first 20 volumes of Index of Middle English Prose. In the absence of a searchable electronic database version of this series, it will be an essential tool for all researchers in this area. Indexes of incipits and excipits are provided, together with author and title indexes and general subject indexes. The project to publish a complete listing of all known manuscript items containing Middle English prose began in 1978, and the first volume appeared in 1984. The final listing will consist of some fifty volumes; with the publication of the twentieth volume in 2009, the corpus was sufficiently extensive to justify the first comprehensive index to the contents of the existing titles. This, the resulting volume, is a vital research tool for anyone working with Middle English prose texts. It is designed to give immediate access to the indices now found separately in the first twenty descriptive manuscript catalogues and begins with a summary contents list for each of these. In additionto an index of first lines, the volume contains other finding aids in the form of an index of rubrics and titles, and a general index. This will enable scholars to quickly find all surviving manuscript copies of a particular textin the collections catalogued to date, and will form the basis of future index volumes. KARI ANNE RAND is Professor of Older English Language at the University of Oslo.

Catullus is one of the most popular poets to survive from classical antiquity. Above all others he seems to speak to modern readers with a modern voice. The distinguished contributors to this Companion discuss the principal subjects which drew Catullus' affection and disgust, above all his famous affair with the woman he calls 'Lesbia', and situate him in the social, historical and intellectual context of first-century BC Rome. One of the so-called 'new poets', Catullus had a profound effect on subsequent Latin poetry, and this is explored especially for the Augustan age and the late first century AD. A significant part of the volume is concerned with Catullus' survival into the modern world. There are discussions both of the manuscript tradition and of the interpretative scholarship which has been devoted to his poetry, as well as his reception by renaissance and later poets. Students in particular will appreciate this book.

Using such terms as science and technology, which have been relatively - cently adopted, to write about situations and events that occurred 2,500 years ago, may be a paradox. The Homeric Epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, refer to the Mycenean Era, a civilisation that ?ourished from the 16th to 12th c- tury BCE. The seeming paradox ceases to be one when modern specialists, searching through the ancients texts, discover knowledge and applications so advanced, that can be termed as scienti?c or technological in the modern sense of the words. The present book is based on extensive research performed by the author and his associates at the University of Patras, along with the presentations of other researchers at two international symposia, which he organized in 1 Ancient Olympia. It consists of ?ve parts, of which Part I is introductory, including such chapters as Homer and Homeric Epics, Troy and the mythological causes of the War, Achilles and his wrath, the siege and fall of Troy, Odysseus' long way home, the Trojan war and the cultural tradition, scienti?c knowledge in the Homeric Epics and ?nally an account on science and technology. Part II includes three chapters on applications of principles of natural s- ence, including chariot racing and the laws of curvilinear motion, creep in wood and hydrodynamics of vortices and the gravitational sling.

The romance or chivalric epic was the most popular form of literature in Renaissance Italy. This book shows how it owed its appeal to a successful fusion of traditional, medieval tales of Charlemagne and Arthur with the newer cultural themes developed by the revival of interest in classical antiquity which constitutes the key to Renaissance culture.

Ancient prose is intriguingly diverse. This volume explores the dynamics of the Latin and Greek prose of the Roman empire in the forms of biography, novel and apologetics which have historically lacked recognition as uncanonical genres, and yet appear vital today. Focusing on the sophistication in thought and artistic texture to be found within these literary kinds, this volume offers a collection of stimulating essays for students and scholars of literature and culture in antiquity - and beyond.

Leontius Of Byzantium (485-543) Byzantine monk and theologian who provided a breakthrough of terminology in the 6th-century Christological controversy over the mode of union of Christ's human nature with his divinity. He did so through his introduction of Aristotelian logical categories and Neoplatonic psychology into Christian speculative theology. His work initiated the later intellectual development of Christian theology throughout medieval culture. Brian E. Daley provides translation and commentary on the six theological works associated with the name of Leontius of Byzantium. The critical text and facing-page translation help make these works more accessible than ever before and provide a reliable textual apparatus for furture scholarship of this key writing.

The force of example was a distinctive determiner of Roman identity. However, examples always rely upon the response of an audience, and are dependent upon context. Even where the example presented is positive, we cannot always suppress any negative associations it may also carry. In this study of the representation of certain central characters in Silius Italicus' Punica, Ben Tipping considers the virtues and vices they embody, their status as exemplars, and the process by which Silius as epic poet heroizes, demonizes, and establishes models. Tipping argues that example is a vital source of significance within the Punica, but also an inherently unstable mode, the lability of which affects both Silius' epic heroes and his villainous Hannibal.

Introduces Skelton and his work to readers unfamiliar with the poet, gathers together the vibrant strands of existing research, and opens up new avenues for future studies. John Skelton is a central literary figure and the leading poet during the first thirty years of Tudor rule. Nevertheless, he remains challenging and even contradictory for modern audiences. This book aims to provide an authoritative guide to this complex poet and his works, setting him in his historical, religious, and social contexts. Beginning with an exploration of his life and career, it goes on to cover all the major aspects of his poetry, from the literary traditions in which he wrote and the form of his compositions to the manuscript contexts and later reception. SEBASTIAN SOBECKI is Professor of Medieval English Literature and Culture at the University of Groningen; JOHN SCATTERGOOD is Professor (Emeritus) of Medieval and Renaissance English at Trinity College, Dublin. Contributors: Tom Betteridge, Julia Boffey, John Burrow, David Carlson, Helen Cooper, Elisabeth Dutton,A.S.G. Edwards, Jane Griffiths, Nadine Kuipers, Carol Meale, John Scattergood, Sebastian Sobecki, Greg Waite

An examination of typology about place in relation to the Virgin Mary. This book takes a fresh look at some of the seemingly tired images of the Virgin Mary across the medieval and early Golden Age period in Hispanic literatures. It explores the Virgin as a gateway and as a Temple, as a garden and asa fountain, as a scented space, and as a strong defensive place (fortress or castle wall). It also explores her as a home and as a nuptial bedchamber, and sets these images in the context of known liturgical usage in medieval andearly modern Spain. LESLEY TWOMEY is Professor of Medieval and Golden Age Art and Literature at Northumbria University. She is the author of several books about peninsular Marian literature.

Representations of feeling in medieval literature are varied and complex. This new collection of essays demonstrates that the history of emotions and affect theory are similarly insufficient for investigating the intersection of body and mind that late Middle English literatures evoke. While medieval studies has generated a rich scholarly literature on 'affective piety', this collection charts an intersectional new investigation of affects, feelings, and emotions in non-religious contexts. From Geoffrey Chaucer to Gavin Douglas, and from practices of witnessing to the adoration of objects, essays in this volume analyze the coexistence of emotion and affect in late medieval representations of feeling.

Iconoclasm was the name given to the stance of that portion of Eastern Christianity that rejected worshipping God through images (eikones) representing Christ, the Virgin or the saints and was the official doctrine of the Byzantine Empire for most of the period between 726 and 843. It was a period marked by violent passions on either side. This is the first comprehensive account of the extant contemporary texts relating to this phenomenon and their impact on society, politics and identity. By examining the literary circles emerging both during the time of persecution and immediately after the restoration of icons in 843, the volume casts new light on the striking (re)construction of Byzantine society, whose iconophile identity was biasedly redefined by the political parties led by Theodoros Stoudites, Gregorios Dekapolites and Empress Theodora or the patriarchs Methodios, Ignatios and Photios. It thereby offers an innovative paradigm for approaching Byzantine literature.

• This new edition has been fully revised to include chapter summaries for students new to medieval sexuality, material from eastern Europe and the Islamic World, gender fluidity and trans identity have been added, the latest work on slavery has been included and lastly the discussion of sex work and how this was defined has been revised, all of these updates offer students additional lenses through which they can see the nuances of medieval attitudes towards sex and sexuality. • Provides a broad survey of sexuality in medieval Europe covering a wide scope, chronologically, geographically, and includes material from Christianity, Judaism and Islam allowing students to see comparisons and differences across countries and centuries. • Written in an engaging way for 2 and 3 year undergraduate and postgraduate students, it guides students through the complex topic whilst introducing the historiography and sources from the period. An all-round textbook for medieval history students.

Although the myth of Atreus' gruesome vengeance on his brother, Thyestes, was embedded in Greek and Roman culture long before his time, Seneca's play is the only literary or dramatic account to have survived intact. Written probably in late Neronian Rome, Thyestes is now widely regarded as one of the tragedian's finest achievements and represents Seneca's most mature reflections on power and civilization, and on the tragic theatre itself. The play's impact on European literature and drama from antiquity to the present has been considerable; now much studied in universities and colleges, and regularly adapted and performed, it still contains much that speaks pointedly to our times: its focus on appetite, lust, violence, and horror; its preoccupation with rhetoric, morality, and power; its concern with the problematics of kinship, and with political, social, and religious institutions and their fragility and impotence; its dramatization of reason's failure, the triumph and cyclicity of evil, the determinism of history, the mastery of the world through mastery of the word; its theatricalized and godless universe. This new edition of Seneca's Thyestes offers a comprehensive introduction, newly edited Latin text, an English verse translation designed for both performance and high-level academic study, and a detailed exegetic, analytic, and interpretative commentary on the play. The aim throughout has been to elucidate the text dramatically as well as philologically, and to locate the play firmly in its contemporary historical and theatrical context and in the ensuing literary and dramatic tradition. As such, the reception of the play by European dramatists is given especial emphasis in the introduction and throughout the commentary; this and the accessible notes on the text make this edition of particular use not only to scholars and students of classics, but also of literature and drama, and to anyone interested in the cultural dynamics of literary reception and in the interplay between theatre and history.

This book examines how Jewish intellectuals during and after the Second World War reinterpreted Homer's epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, in light of their own wartime experiences, drawing a parallel between the ancient Greek genocide of the Trojans and the Nazi genocide of the Jews. The wartime writings of Theodore Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Erich Auerbach, Rachel Bespaloff, Hermann Broch, Max Horkheimer, Primo Levi, and others were attempts both to understand the collapse of European civilization and the Enlightenment through critiques of their foundational texts and to imagine the place of the Homeric epics in a new post-War humanism. The book thus also explores the reception of these writers, analyzing how Jewish child-survivors like Geoffrey Hartman and Helene Cixous and writers of the post-Holocaust generation like Daniel Mendelsohn continued to read the epics as narratives of grief, trauma, and woundedness into the twenty-first century..

In the past century, scholars have observed a veritable full cast of characters from Roman comedy in the poetry of Catullus. Despite this growing recognition of comedy's allusive presence in Catullus' work, there has never been an extended analysis of how he engaged with this foundational Roman genre. This book sketches a more coherent picture of Catullus' use of Roman comedy and shows that individual points of contact with the theatre in his corpus are part of a larger, more sustained poetic program than has been recognized. Roman comedy, it argues, offered Catullus a common cultural vocabulary, drawn from the public stage and shared with his audience, with which to explore and convey private ideas about love, friendship, and social rivalry. It also demonstrates that Roman comedy continued to present writers after the second century BCE with a meaningful source of social, cultural, and artistic value.

Of unknown authorship, Beowulf is an Old English epic poem which incites contentious debate and has been endlessly interpreted over the centuries. This Reader's Guide provides a much-needed overview of the large body of Beowulf criticism, moving from eighteenth-century reactions to twenty-first-century responses. Jodi-Ann George: * charts the changes in critical trends and theoretical approaches applied to the poem * includes discussion of J. R. R. Tolkein's pioneering 1936 lecture on Beowulf , and Seamus Heaney's recent translation * analyses Beowulf in popular culture, addressing the poem's life in film versions, graphic novels, music and comics. Clear and engaging, this is an indispensable introductory guide to a widely-studied and enigmatic work which continues to fascinate readers everywhere.

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.

Since antiquity, Book 8 of Thucydides' History has been considered an unpolished draft which lacks revision. Even those who admit that the book has some elements of internal coherence believe that Thucydides, if death had not prevented him, would have improved many chapters or even the whole structure of the book. Consequently, while the first seven books of the History have been well examined through the last two centuries, the narrative plan of Book 8 remains an obscure subject, as we do not possess an extensive and detailed presentation of its whole narrative design. Vasileios Liotsakis tries to satisfy this central desideratum of the Thucydidean scholarship by offering a thorough description of the compositional plan, which, in his opinion, Thucydides put into effect in the last 109 chapters of his work. His study elaborates on the structural parts of the book, their details, and the various techniques through which Thucydides composed his narration in order to reach the internal cohesion of these chapters as well as their close connection to the rest of the History. Liotsakis offers us an original approach not only of Book 8 but also of the whole work, since his observations reshape our overall view of the History.

Featured here is a modern translation of a medieval herbal, with a study showing how this technical treatise on herbs was turned into a literary curiosity in the nineteenth century. The contours of this second edition replicate the first; however, it has been revised and updated throughout to reflect new scholarship and new findings. New information is presented on Oswald Cockayne, the nineteenth-century philologist who first translated the Old English medical texts for the modern world. Here the medieval text is read as an example of technical writing (i.e., intended to convey instructions/information), not as literature. The audience it was originally aimed at would know how to diagnose and treat medical conditions and knew or was learning how to follow its instructions. For that reason, while working on the translation, specialists in relevant fields were asked to shed light on its terse wording, for example, herbalists and physicians. Unlike many current studies, this work discusses the Herbarium and other medical texts in Old English as part of a tradition developed throughout early-medieval Europe associated with monasteries and their libraries. The book is intended for scholars in cross-cultural fields; that is, with roots in one field and branches in several, such as nineteenth-century or medieval studies, for historians of herbalism, medicine, pharmacy, botany, and of the Western Middle Ages, broadly and inclusively defined, and for readers interested in the history of herbalism and medicine.

This fascinating introduction to the comedy of Menander is the work of two classical scholars, both of whom have worked extensively as theatre practitioners. This is the first book to consider the plays of Menander primarily as performance pieces and to uncover the dramatic technique of this widely admired comic writer, whose plays had all but disappeared until the 1950s. Looking at the theatrical context of Menandrian comedy in its widest sense, the book includes discussions of recent productions, the recovery of the texts, the treatment of women and slaves, the nature of Menander's comedy, and where it may have led within the European tradition. This book will be of interest to both students of theatre and classicists.