While the field of classics has informed and influenced the early developments of the field of psychology, these two disciplines presently enjoy fewer fruitful cross-fertilizations than one would expect. This book shows how the study of classics can help psychologists anchor their scientific findings in a historical, literary and philosophical framework, while insights of contemporary psychology offer new hermeneutic methods and explanations to classicists. This book is the first to date to offer a wide-ranging overview of the possibilities of marrying contemporary trends in psychology and classical studies. Advocating a critical dialogue between both disciplines, it offers novel reflections on psychotherapy, ancient philosophy, social psychology, literature and its theory, historiography, psychoanalysis, tragedy, the philosophy of mind, linguistics and reception. With twenty contributions by specialists in different fields, it promotes the combination of classical and psychological perspectives, and demonstrates the methods and rewards of such an endeavour through concrete case studies. This pioneering book is thus intended for all readers who seek inspiration for their readings, research, or therapeutic practice.

Winner of the 2021 Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize of the American Society of Church History Winner of the 2022 SMFS Best First Book in Medieval Feminist Studies Award An overlooked aspect of the iconography of the Annunciation investigated - Mary's book. The Annunciation remains one of the most recognizable scenes in western Christianity: the angel Gabriel addressing the Virgin Mary, capturing the moment when Christ becomes incarnate. But one consistent detail has evaded our scrutiny - Mary's book. What was she reading? What does her book mean? This innovative study traces the history of Mary's book at the Annunciation from the early Middle Ages through to the Reformation, focusing on a wide variety of religious treatises, visionary accounts, and art. It argues that the Virgin provided a sophisticated model of reading and interpretation that was foundational to devotional practices across all spectrums of society in medieval England, and especially for enclosed female readers. By imitating the Virgin, readers learned how to read; they learned how to pray; they learned how to channel God through vision and revelation. Most of all, they learned how to conceive God spiritually, just as Mary had conceived him physically, and just as she had conceived intellectually her reading of the Old Testament prophecies foretelling the Incarnation - that she herself was part of their fulfillment. The Annunciation offered a hermeneutic model of conception radically based on the reproductive female body, otherwise deeply problematic in medieval culture. Scholars have long studied the importance of the Virgin Mary for medieval people. But few would think of her as an intellectual role model. Yet that is what this book contends - that Mary's reading at the Annunciation is, essentially, a missing link for understanding how reading, interpretation, and devotion worked in the Middle Ages.

This book provides a detailed survey of the hundreds of non-biblical serious plays which survive from the tenth to the sixteenth centuries. The performers vary from civic groups and literary societies to courts and convents: mainly amateurs, but they left a legacy of stories that was drawn upon by the writers for the professional theatre companies of Elizabethan England, Golden Age Spain and the rich baroque theatre of France. Stories from the Golden Legend and collections of Marian miracles appear side by side with folk tales and traditional stories brought from the Middle East by merchants, pilgrims and other travellers. Muir considers what she terms the ???legacy??? of these tales: when playwrights for the new public theatres such as Shakespeare and Lope de Vega retain the situations and settings of the older stories but transform them by the emphasis on psychology and the gradual disappearance of the religious element.

Conceived as a necessary reconsideration of the pristine "elegiac question" in Ovid's Metamorphoses, this book intends to offer an analysis of the function of elegiac discourse within Ovid's magnum opus from the perspective of metapoetics. To that end, the author undertakes, in the first section, a close re-reading of some relevant passages of Latin love elegy. From a prism that takes into account the characteristically elegiac multivocality, the genre reveals itself as an agonistic discourse in which the poet dramatises his metaliterary power-relation with the puella, who is unveiled as the synthesis of the distinct sub-products of his poetic activity. Thereupon, the author proceeds to scrutinise how elegiac elements are assimilated and transformed as they become integrated within the framework of Ovid's poem of changing forms. Far from being a mere stylistic ornament, the presence of an elegiac register in many erotic passages tells us about Ovid's stance towards love as a metapoetic trope. By reworking elegiac tradition to the point of transforming it into a novum corpus, the poet ultimately substantiates the mutability of generic categories.

Living on an island at the edge of the known world, the medieval Irish were in a unique position to examine the spaces of the North Atlantic region and contemplate how geography can shape a people. This book is the first full-length study of medieval Irish topographical writing. It situates the theories and poetics of Irish place - developed over six centuries in response to a variety of political, cultural, religious and economic changes - in the bigger theoretical picture of studies of space, landscape, environmental writing and postcolonial identity construction. Presenting focused studies of important literary texts by authors from Ireland and Britain, it shows how these discourses influenced European conceptions of place and identity, as well as understandings of how to write the world. -- .

This book explores Grahame's engagements with classical antiquity in The Wind in the Willows, including ancient epic, parody (Batrachomyomachia), and pastoral imagery. Irby demonstrates how subtle echoes - such as the structure into 12 books, arming scenes, epic catalogues, anabases and katabases, lying tales, Toad's "cleverness"-cumulatively suggest a link between The Wind in the Willows and classical literature. This study offers the first sustained treatment of classical allusions in The Wind in the Willows, considering the entire novel, not isolated scenes, building on existing scholarship to yield an interpretation through the lens of classical literature and its reception in Victorian and Edwardian England. This volume will provide a unique resource for students and scholars of classical reception and literature, as well as comparative literature, English literature, children's literature, gender studies, and Grahame's writing.

Recently the importance for Herodotus' work of contemporary medical and sophistic thought and techniques of argument has been widely recognised, as long had been his dependence on and difference from earlier geographical and ethnographic writing. This volume focuses on the place of these interests in his investigatory techniques and sets them alongside his many narrative skills, from superficially traditonal battle narrative and reworking of Greek or non-Greek traditions that border on myth to the structuring of narrative by highlighting the life of objects, and addresses such fundamental issues as how he chooses between competing explanations and how far he valued truth. The book tackles many of the basic issues that confront any attempt to understand Herodotus' work.

The bucolic Idylls of Theocritus are the first literature to invent a fully fictional world that is not an image of reality but an alternative to it. It is thereby distinguished from the other Idylls and from Hellenistic poetry as a whole. This book examines these poems in the light of ancient and modern conceptions of fictionality. It explores how access to this fictional world is mediated by form and how this world appears as an object of desire for the characters within it. The argument culminates in a fresh reading of Idyll 7, where Professor Payne discusses the encounter between author and fictional creation in the poem and its importance for the later pastoral tradition. Close readings of Theocritus, Callimachus, Hermesianax and the Lament for Bion are supplemented with parallels from modern contemporary fiction and an extended discussion of the heteronymic poetry of Fernando Pessoa.

Byzantine Childhood examines the intricacies of growing up in medieval Byzantium, children's everyday experiences, and their agency. By piecing together a wide range of sources and utilising several methodological approaches inspired by intersectionality, history from below and microhistory, it analyses the life course of Byzantine boys and girls and how medieval Byzantine society perceived and treated them according to societal and cultural expectations surrounding age, gender, and status. Ultimately, it seeks to reconstruct a more plausible picture of the everyday life of children, one of the most vulnerable social groups throughout history and often a neglected subject in scholarship. Written in a lively and engaging manner, this book is necessary reading for scholars and students of Byzantine history, as well as those interested in the history of childhood and the family.

Medieval discourses of masculinity and male sexuality were closely linked to the idea and representation of work as a male responsibility. Isabel Davis identifies a discourse of masculine selfhood which is preoccupied with the ethics of labour and domestic living. She analyses how five major London writers of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries constructed the male self: William Langland, Thomas Usk, John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer and Thomas Hoccleve. These literary texts, while they have often been considered for what they say about the feminine role and identity, have rarely been thought of as evidence for masculinity; this study seeks to redress that imbalance. Looking again at the texts themselves, and their cultural contexts, Davis presents a genuinely fresh perspective on ideas about gender, labour and domestic life in medieval Britain.

This study focuses on ways in which Statius' epic Thebaid, a poem about the civil war between Oedipus' sons Eteocles and Polynices, reflects the theme of internal discord in its narrative strategies. At the same time that Statius reworks the Homeric and Virgilian epic traditions, he engages with Hellenistic poetic ideals as exemplified by Callimachus and the Roman Callimachean poets, especially Ovid. The result is a tension between the impulse towards the generic expectations of warfare and the desire for delay and postponement of such conflict. Ultimately, Statius adheres to the mythic paradigm of the mutual fratricide, but he continues to employ competing strategies that call attention to the fictive nature of any project of closure and conciliation. In the process, the poem offers a new mode of epic closure that emphasizes individual means of resolution.

In the early fifteenth century, English poets responded to a changed climate of patronage, instituted by Henry IV and successor monarchs, by inventing a new tradition of public and elite poetry. Following Chaucer and others, Hoccleve and Lydgate brought to English verse a new style and subject matter to write about their King, nation, and themselves, and their innovations influenced a continuous line of poets running through and beyond Wyatt. A crucial aspect of this new tradition is its development of ideas and practices associated with the role of poet laureate. Robert J. Meyer-Lee examines the nature and significance of this tradition as it develops from the fourteenth century to Tudor times, tracing its evolution from one author to the next. This study illuminates the relationships between poets and political power and makes plain the tremendous impact this verse has had on the shape of English literary culture.

Essays on a variety of topics in late medieval literature, linked by an engagement with form. The insight that "the implications of textuality as such" can and must underlie our interpretations of literary works remains one of A.C. Spearing's greatest contributions to medieval studies. It is a tribute to the breadth and significance of his scholarship that the twelve essays gathered in his honour move beyond his own methods and interests to engage variously with "textuality as such," presenting a substantial and expansive view of current thinking on form in late medieval literary studies. Covering a range of topics, including the meaning of words, "experientiality", poetic form and its cultural contexts, revisions, rereadings, subjectivity, formalism and historicism, failures of form, the dit, problems of editing lyrics, and collective subjectivity in lyric, they offer a spectrum of the best sort of work blossoming forth from close reading of the kind Spearing was such an early advocate for,continues to press, and which is now so central to medieval studies. Authors and works addressed include Chaucer (The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, The Legend of Good Women, "Adam Scriveyn", "To Rosemounde", "TheComplaint Unto Pity"), Langland (Piers Plowman), the Gawain-poet (Cleanness), Charles d'Orleans, Gower (Confessio Amantis), and anonymous lyrics. Cristina Maria Cervone teaches English literature and medieval studies at the University of Memphis; D. Vance Smith is Professor of English at Princeton University. Contributors: Derek Pearsall, Elizabeth Fowler, Claire M. Waters, Kevin Gustafson, Michael Calabrese, David Aers, Nicolette Zeeman, Jill Mann, D. Vance Smith, J.A. Burrow, Ardis Butterfield, Cristina Maria Cervone, Peter Baker.

Aristophanes' Birds, Wasps and Frogs offer the best-known examples of the animal choruses of Greek comedy of the fifth century BC, but sixth-century vase-paintings of men costumed as cocks, bulls and horses indicated that comedies were only the last phase of a longer tradition. This book suggests that although the earlier masquerades may have had ritual origins, they should be seen also as products of the culture of the archaic aristocratic symposium. The animal choruses of the late fifth century may have been conscious revivals of an earlier tradition. Moreover, the animals of comedy were not the predators found in other literary genres; they were, instead, social animals who showed that nature and culture could co-exist. The Birds, which tells the story of a city foundation, also parodies fifth-century philosophical accounts of the origins of human civilization. Also discussed are the Wasps, Frogs and fragments of lost comedies.

Seminal investigations into the most important aspects of medieval Scots texts, with a particular focus on editing and manuscript context. This rich selection from the writings of Priscilla Bawcutt, the major scholar of Older Scots literature, both honours her achievement and provides authoritative guidance to all involved in the pleasures and challenges of medieval and early modern Scottish studies. The first five chapters, including a hitherto unpublished paper, gather her insights into how to examine, contextualize, and edit early poetic texts. Among her discussions are those on the importance of explanatory notes, the usefulness of fragments, the demands of transcription, and the need for objectivity when identifying supposed influences, date, or author. Bawcutt draws on a variety of texts, including Dunbar's "elrich fantasyis", Rolland's Court of Venus, and metrical Scottish charms to illustrate these aspects of editing. Two central chapters then give balance and coherence to the complex evidence of change in literary activities and tastes in early Scotland. First, an analytical survey of manuscript miscellanies, noting their diversity in size, condition, arrangement, copyists, owners, and purposes, offers many different ways to approach these compilations. Secondly, Bawcutt's study of one particular miscellany, the great five-part Bannatyne Manuscript, provides new information on the sources and authors of the many texts it contains and the diversity of their literary and cultural connections. Five further chapters combine textual and bibliographical studies with contextual explorations, into personal libraries, habits of reading, annotators, and book circulation within family groups, across borders, or over time. Among these illuminating essays are those on Gavin Douglas's imaginary library, and the influential first printed edition of his Eneados, both of increasing interest alongside the new edition of his translation. A full bibliography of Priscilla Bawcutt's publications is also included.

This is the first study of the Anglo-Welsh border region in the period before the Norman arrival in England, from the fifth to the twelfth centuries. Its conclusions significantly alter our current picture of Anglo/Welsh relations before the Norman Conquest by overturning the longstanding critical belief that relations between these two peoples during this period were predominately contentious. Writing the Welsh borderlands in Anglo-Saxon England demonstrates that the region which would later become the March of Wales was not a military frontier in Anglo-Saxon England, but a distinctively mixed Anglo-Welsh cultural zone which was depicted as a singular place in contemporary Welsh and Anglo-Saxon texts. This study reveals that the region of the Welsh borderlands was much more culturally coherent, and the impact of the Norman Conquest on it much greater, than has been previously realised. -- .

This book explores how Virgil in his Aeneid incorporates the ancient Stoics' thinking about how humans can exercise moral responsibility and how this can affect providential world fate. The third-century BC philosopher Chrysippus of Soli located this freedom in the way we can assent to courses of action, and Graham Zanker innovatively demonstrates how Virgil appropriates this concept in the way that Jupiter and Aeneas can assent to the world fate in which they have discovered they must play a part, or Juno and Dido can withhold their assent to it. Indeed, Virgil even offers the model to no-one less than Augustus: the emperor is invited to give his assent to ruling what was believed to be his 'world-wide' empire justly. The book is accessible to both students and professional scholars of the Aeneid, with all Greek and Latin translated into idiomatic English.

This book examines the development of English-translated Tang poetry and its propagation to the Western world. It consists of two parts, the first of which addresses the initial stage of English-translated Tang poetry's propagation, and the second exploring its further development. By analyzing the historical background and characteristics of these two stages, the book traces the trend back to its roots, discusses some well-known early sinologists and their contributions, and familiarizes readers with the general course of Tang poetry's development. In addition, it presents the translated versions of many Tang poems. The dissemination of Tang poetry to the Western world is a significant event in the history of cross-cultural communication. From the simple imitation of poetic techniques to the acceptance and identification of key poetic concepts, the Tang poetry translators gradually constructed a classic "Chinese style" in modern American poetry. Hence, the traditional Chinese culture represented by Tang poetry spread more widely in the English-speaking world, producing a more lasting impact on societies and cultures outside China - and demonstrating the poetry's ability to transcend the boundaries of time, region, nationality and culture. Due to different cultural backgrounds, the Tang poets or poems admired most by Western readers may not necessarily receive high acclaim in China. Sometimes language barriers and cultural differences make it impossible to represent certain allusions or cultural and ethnic concepts correctly during the translation process. However, in recent decades, the translation of Tang poetry has evolved considerably in both quantity and quality. As culture is manifested in language, and language is part of culture, the translation of Tang poetry has allowed Western scholars to gain an unprecedented understanding of China and Chinese culture.

For decades, medieval scholarship has been dominated by the paradigm that women who wielded power after c. 1100 were exceptions to the "rule" of female exclusion from governance and the public sphere. This collection makes a powerful case for a new paradigm. Building on the premise that elite women in positions of authority were expected, accepted, and routine, these essays traverse the cities and kingdoms of France, England, Germany, Portugal, and the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem in order to illuminate women's roles in medieval power structures. Without losing sight of the predominance of patriarchy and misogyny, contributors lay the groundwork for the acceptance of female public authority as normal in medieval society, fostering a new framework for understanding medieval elite women and power.

In 30-15 BC Sextus Propertius composed at Rome four books of elegies which range from erotic to learned to political and exhibit an unparalleled richness of themes, concepts and language. This book investigates their sources and motives, examining Propertius' family background in Umbrian Asisium and tracing his career as he sought through poetry to restore his family's fortunes after the Civil Wars. Propertius' progress within the Roman poetic establishment depended on his patrons - Tullus, 'Gallus', Maecenas and Augustus. Initially his poetry was influenced radically by his elegiac predecessor C. Cornelius Gallus, arguably also the 'Gallus' who jointly patronised Propertius' first book. New heuristic techniques help to recover the impact on Propertius of Cornelius Gallus' (mainly lost) elegies. Propertius' subsequent move into Maecenas', and then Augustus', patronage had an equally powerful, ideological, impact; in his latter books he became (alongside Virgil and Horace) a major and committed Augustan voice.

This book explores accounts in the Sagas of Icelanders of encounters with foreign peoples, both abroad and in Iceland, who are portrayed according to stereotypes which vary depending on their origins. Notably, inhabitants of the places identified in the sagas as Irland, Skotland and Vinland are portrayed as being less civilized than the Icelanders themselves. This book explores the ways in which the Islendingasoegur emphasize this relative barbarity through descriptions of diet, material culture, style of warfare and character. These characteristics are discussed in relation to parallel descriptions of Icelandic characters and lifestyle within the Islendingasoegur, and also in the context of a tradition in contemporary European literature, which portrayed the Icelanders themselves as barbaric. Comparisons are made with descriptions of barbarians in classical Roman texts, primarily Sallust, but also Caesar and Tacitus, showing striking similarities between Roman and Icelandic ideas about barbarians.

St. Margaret of Antioch was one of the most popular saints in medieval England and, throughout the Middle Ages, the various Lives of St. Margaret functioned as a blueprint for a virginal life and supernatural assistance to pregnant women during the dangerous process of labor. In her narrative, Margaret is accosted by various demons and, having defeated each monster in turn, she is taken to the place of her martyrdom where she prays for supernatural boons for her adherents. This book argues that Margaret's monsters are a key element in understanding Margaret's importance to her adherents, specifically how the sexual identities of her adherents were constructed and maintained. More broadly, this study offers three major contributions to the field of medieval studies: first, it argues for the utility of a diachronic analysis of Saints' Lives literature in a field dominated by synchronic analyses; second, this diachronic analysis is important to interpreting the intertext of Saints' Lives, not only between different Lives but also different versions of the same Life; and third, the approach further suggests that the most valuable socio-cultural information in hagiographic literature is found in the auxiliary characters and not in the figure of the saint him/herself.

The belief in the reality of demons and the restless dead formed a central facet of the medieval worldview. Whether a pestilent-spreading corpse mobilised by the devil, a purgatorial spirit returning to earth to ask for suffrage, or a shape-shifting demon intent on crushing its victims as they slept, encounters with supernatural entities were often met with consternation and fear. Chroniclers, hagiographers, sermon writers, satirists, poets, and even medical practitioners utilised the cultural 'text' of the supernatural encounter in many different ways, showcasing the multiplicity of contemporary attitudes to death, disease, and the afterlife. In this volume, Stephen Gordon explores the ways in which conflicting ideas about the intention and agency of supernatural entities were understood and articulated in different social and literary contexts. Focusing primarily on material from medieval England, c.1050-1450, Gordon discusses how writers such as William of Malmesbury, William of Newburgh, Walter Map, John Mirk, and Geoffrey Chaucer utilised the belief in demons, nightmares, and walking corpses for pointed critical effect. Ultimately, this monograph provides new insights into the ways in which the broad ontological category of the 'revenant' was conceptualised in the medieval world.

This book examines the writings of four ancient Greeks-Homer, Thucydides, Euripides, and Aristophanes. Each of these four individuals represents a different approach toward the human condition, ranging from the heroic and tragic to the comic and absurd. This book focuses on how the human condition can best be understood within the framework of these four perspectives by examining the major contributions of these Greek writers, whether in the form of epic (Homer's Iliad), history (Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War), or drama (the plays of Euripides and Aristophanes). These various perceptions of Greek thought illuminate our understanding of what it means to be fully human. By focusing on the concepts of the heroic, tragic, comic, and absurd, we can see how these ancient Greek authors still provide key insights for us today as they clarify those timeless features that define the human condition.