The notions of other peoples, cultures, and natural conditions have always been determined by the epistemology of imagination and fantasy, providing much freedom and creativity, and yet have also created much fear, anxiety, and horror. In this regard, the pre-modern world demonstrates striking parallels with our own insofar as the projections of alterity might be different by degrees, but they are fundamentally the same by content. Dreams, illusions, projections, concepts, hopes, utopias/dystopias, desires, and emotional attachments are as specific and impactful as the physical environment. This volume thus sheds important light on the various lenses used by people in the Middle Ages and the early modern age as to how they came to terms with their perceptions, images, and notions. Previous scholarship focused heavily on the history of mentality and history of emotions, whereas here the history of pre-modern imagination, and fantasy assumes center position. Imaginary things are taken seriously because medieval and early modern writers and artists clearly reveal their great significance in their works and their daily lives. This approach facilitates a new deep-structure analysis of pre-modern culture.

The victory ode was a short-lived poetic genre in the fifth century BC, but its impact has been substantial. Pindar, Bacchylides and others are now among the most widely read Greek authors precisely because of their significance for the literary development of poetry between Homer and tragedy and their historical involvement in promoting Greek rulers. Their influence was so great that it ultimately helped to define the European notion of lyric from the Renaissance onwards. This collection of essays by international experts examines the victory ode from a range of angles: its genesis and evolution, the nature of the commissioning process, the patrons, context of performance and re-performance, and the poetics of the victory ode and its exponents. From these different perspectives the contributors offer both a panoramic view of the genre and an insight into the modern research positions on this complex and fascinating subject.

In this original and innovative study, Scott T. Smith traces the intersections between land tenure and literature in Anglo-Saxon England. Smith aptly demonstrates that as land became property through the operations of writing, it came to assume a complex range of conceptual values that Anglo-Saxons could use to engage a number of vital cultural concerns beyond just the legal and practical - such as political dominion, salvation, sanctity, status, and social and spiritual obligations.

Land and Book places a variety of texts - including charters, dispute records, heroic poetry, homilies, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle - in a dynamic conversation with the procedures and documents of land tenure, showing how its social practice led to innovation across written genres in both Latin and Old English. Through this, Smith provides an interdisciplinary synthesis of literary, legal, and historical interests.

This volume on Greek synchronic etymology offers a set of papers evidencing the cultural significance of etymological commitment in ancient and medieval literature. The four sections illustrate the variety of approaches of the same object, which for Greek writers was much more than a technical way of studying language. Contributions focus on the functions of etymology as they were intended by the authors according to their own aims. (1) "Philosophical issues" addresses the theory of etymology and its explanatory power, especially in Plato and in Neoplatonism. (2) "Linguistic issues" discusses various etymologizing techniques and the status of etymology, which was criticized and openly rejected by some authors. (3) "Poetical practices of etymology" investigates the ubiquitous presence of etymological reflections in learned poetry, whatever the genre, didactic, aetiological or epic. (4) "Etymology and word-plays" addresses the vexed question of the limit between a mere pun and a real etymological explanation, which is more than once difficult to establish. The wide range of genres and authors and the interplay between theoretical reflection and applied practice shows clearly the importance of etymology in Greek thought.

The contributions contained in this volume offer a multidisciplinary approach into the history of the parts of speech and their role in building phrases and sentences. They fulfill a current interest for syntactic problems for combining recent linguistic theories with the long tradition of the Classical studies. The studies cover a chronological range reaching from Aristotle to Priscian and deal with concepts like and o , or the two Aristotelian expressions and as well as and in Apollonius Dyscolos and the corresponding Latin term transitio and finally the Latin pronouns qui or quis. Through the metalinguistic approach the authors tackle syntactic structures like dependency or government, syntactic features or properties such as transitivity or subject and predicate or the development of the syntactic role of pronouns in introducing relative sentences. Furthermore, in providing testimonies of the historical existence of the controversy anomaly-analogy, the history of this quarrel is drawn from the Alexandrinian tradition to the Latin one with emphasis on the studium grammaticae as a development of an independent field of study.

Both our view of Seneca's philosophical thought and our approach to the ancient consolatory genre have radically changed since the latest commentary on the Consolatio ad Marciam was written in 1981. The aim of this work is to offer a new book-length commentary on the earliest of Seneca's extant writings, along with a revision of the Latin text and a reassessment of Seneca's intellectual program, strategies, and context. A crucial document to penetrate Seneca's discourse on the self in its embryonic stages, the Ad Marciam is here taken seriously as an engaging attempt to direct the persuasive power of literary models and rhetorical devices toward the fundamentally moral project of healing Marcia's grief and correcting her cognitive distortions. Through close reading of the Latin text, this commentary shows that Seneca invariably adapts different traditions and voices - from Greek consolations to Plato's dialogues, from the Roman discourse of gender and exemplarity to epic poetry - to a Stoic framework, so as to give his reader a lucid understanding of the limits of the self and the ineluctability of natural laws.

Historical examples played a key role in ancient Roman culture, and Matthew B. Roller's book presents a coherent model for understanding the rhetorical, moral, and historiographical operations of Roman exemplarity. It examines the process of observing, evaluating, and commemorating noteworthy actors, or deeds, and then holding those performances up as norms by which to judge subsequent actors or as patterns for them to imitate. The model is fleshed out via detailed case studies of individual exemplary performers, the monuments that commemorate them, and the later contexts - the political arguments and social debates - in which these figures are invoked to support particular positions or agendas. Roller also considers the boundaries of, and ancient alternatives to, exemplary modes of argumentation, morality, and historical thinking. The book will engage anyone interested in how societies, from ancient Rome to today, invoke past performers and their deeds to address contemporary concerns and interests.

Though often assumed by scholars to be a product of traditional, and perhaps oral, compositional practices comparable to those found in early Greek epic, archaic elegy has not until this point been analyzed in similar detail with respect to such verse-making techniques. This volume is intended to redress some of this imbalance by exploring several issues related to the production of Greek elegiac poetry. By investigating elegy's metrical partitioning and its localizing patterns of repeated phraseology, Traditional Elegy makes clear that the oral-formulaic processes lying at the heart of Homeric epic bear close resemblance to those that also originally made archaic elegy possible. However, the volume's argument is then able to be pressed even further by looking at the most common metrical "anomaly" in early elegy-epic correption-in order to demonstrate that elegiac poets in the Archaic Period were not simply mimicking an earlier productive style but were actively engaging with such traditional techniques in order to produce and reproduce their own poems. Because correption exhibits several patterns of employment that depend upon the meshing and adapting of traditional phraseological units, it becomes clear that in elegy--just as it is in epic--this metrical phenomenon is inextricably entwined with traditional techniques of verse-composition, and we therefore have strong evidence that elegiac poets of the Archaic Period were still making active use of these oral-formulaic techniques, even if actual oral composition itself cannot be proven for any individual author or poetic fragment. The implications of such findings are quite large, as they require a wholesale shift in our modern methods of inquiry into elegy for a wide range of concerns of meter, phraseology, and even the much broader issues of intended meaning and overall aesthetics.

This is a full-scale edition with commentary of the archaic epic poems Oichalias Halosis by Kreophylos of Samos and Herakleia by Peisandros of Kamiros. The Greek text (divided between testimonies and fragments) is accompanied by detailed critical apparatus and English translation. There are also extensive introductions to the biography of each poet, the title of the poem, its content and style, as well as a careful examination of the relative chronology of each epic. The detailed commentary of every fragment offers an up-to-date examination of all the extant material that has come down to us through a rich indirect tradition. This is the second installment of the project Early Greek Epic Poets (vol. I: Genealogical and Antiquarian Epic, De Gruyter 2017), which aims to enhance the study of Greek epic poetry of the archaic and classical period by means of providing readers with authoritative editions and commentaries of a significant part of fragmentary early Greek epic.

For earlier medieval Christians, the Bible was the book of guidance above all others, and the route to religious knowledge, used for all kinds of practical purposes, from divination to models of government in kingdom or household. This book's focus is on how medieval people accessed Scripture by reading, but also by hearing and memorizing sound-bites from the liturgy, chants and hymns, or sermons explicating Scripture in various vernaculars. Time, place and social class determined access to these varied forms of Scripture. Throughout the earlier medieval period, the Psalms attracted most readers and searchers for meanings. This book's contributors probe readers' motivations, intellectual resources and religious concerns. They ask for whom the readers wrote, where they expected their readers to be located and in what institutional, social and political environments they belonged; why writers chose to write about, or draw on, certain parts of the Bible rather than others, and what real-life contexts or conjunctures inspired them; why the Old Testament so often loomed so large, and how its law-books, its histories, its prophetic books and its poetry were made intelligible to readers, hearers and memorizers. This book's contributors, in raising so many questions, do justice to both uniqueness and diversity.

The Greek romance was for the Roman period what epic was for the Archaic period or drama for the Classical: the central literary vehicle for articulating ideas about the relationship between self and community. This book offers a fresh reading of the romance both as a distinctive narrative form (using a range of narrative theories) and as a paradigmatic expression of identity (social, sexual and cultural). At the same time it emphasises the elasticity of romance narrative and its ability to accommodate both conservative and transformative models of identity. This elasticity manifests itself partly in the variation in practice between different romancers, some of whom are traditionally Hellenocentric while others are more challenging. Ultimately, however, it is argued that it reflects a tension in all romance narrative, which characteristically balances centrifugal against centripetal dynamics. This book will interest classicists, historians of the novel and students of narrative theory.

For generations, early Franciscan thought has been widely regarded as unoriginal: a mere attempt to systematize the longstanding intellectual tradition of Augustine in the face of the rising popularity of Aristotle. This volume brings together leading scholars in the field to undertake a major study of the major doctrines and debates of the so-called Summa Halensis (1236-45), which was collaboratively authored by the founding members of the Franciscan school at Paris, above all, Alexander of Hales, and John of La Rochelle, in an effort to lay down the Franciscan intellectual tradition or the first time. The contributions will highlight that this tradition, far from unoriginal, laid the groundwork for later Franciscan thought, which is often regarded as formative for modern thought. Furthermore, the volume shows the role this Summa played in the development of the burgeoning field of systematic theology, which has its origins in the young university of Paris. This is a crucial and groundbreaking study for those with interests in the history of western thought and theology specifically.

This study focuses on the metaphysics of the great Arabic philosopher Avicenna (or Ibn Sina, d. 1037 C.E.). More specifically, it delves into Avicenna's theory of quiddity or essence, a topic which seized the attention of thinkers both during the medieval and modern periods. Building on recent contributions in Avicennian studies, this book proposes a new and comprehensive interpretation of Avicenna's theory of 'the pure quiddity' (also known as 'the quiddity in itself') and of its ontology. The study provides a careful philological analysis of key passages gleaned from the primary sources in Arabic and a close philosophical contextualization of Avicenna's doctrines in light of the legacy of ancient Greek philosophy in Islam and the early development of Arabic philosophy (falsafah) and theology (kalam). The study pays particular attention to how Avicenna's theory of quiddity relates to the ancient Greek philosophical discussion about the universals or common things and Mu'tazilite ontology. Its main thesis is that Avicenna articulated a sophisticated doctrine of the ontology of essence in light of Greek and Bahshamite sources, which decisively shaped subsequent intellectual history in Islam and the Latin West.

A crucial question throughout the Middle Ages, the relationship between body and spirit cannot be understood without an interdisciplinary approach - combining literature, philosophy and medicine. Gathering contributions by leading international scholars from these disciplines, the collected volume explores themes such as lovesickness, the five senses, the role of memory and passions, in order to shed new light on the complex nature of the medieval Self.

This is the first volume dedicated to Plautus' perennially popular comedy Casina that analyses the play for a student audience and assumes no knowledge of Latin. It launches a much-needed new series of books, each discussing a comedy that survives from the ancient world. Four chapters highlight the play's historical context, themes, performance and reception, including its reflection of recent societal trends in marriage and property ownership by women after the Punic Wars, and its complex dynamics on stage. It is ideal for students, but helpful also for scholars wanting a brief introduction to the play. Casina pits a husband (Lysidamus) and wife (Cleostrata) against each other in a struggle for control of a 16-year-old slave named Casina. Cleostrata cleverly plots to frustrate the efforts of her lascivious elderly husband, staging a cross-dressing 'marriage' that culminates in his complete humiliation. The play provides rich insights into relationships within the Roman family. This volume analyses how Casina addresses such issues as women's status and property rights, the distribution of power within a Roman household, and sexual violence, all within a compellingly meta-comic framework from which Cleostrata emerges as a surprising comic hero. It also examines the play's enduring popularity and relevance.

The best known variety of the ancient novel - sometimes identified with the ancient novel tout court - is the Greek love novel. The question of its origins has intrigued scholars for centuries and has been the focus of a great deal of research. Stefan Tilg proposes a new solution to this ancient puzzle by arguing for a personal inventor of the genre, Chariton of Aphrodisias, who wrote the first Greek (and, with that, the first European) love novel, Narratives about Callirhoe, in the mid-first century AD. Tilg's conclusion is drawn on the basis of two converging lines of argument, one from literary history, another from Chariton's poetics, and will shed fresh light upon the reception of Latin literature in the Greek world.

Tenderness is not a notion commonly associated with the Romans, whose mythical origin was attributed to brutal rape. Yet, as Herica Valladares argues in this ground-breaking study, in the second half of the first century BCE Roman poets, artists, and their audience became increasingly interested in describing, depicting, and visualizing the more sentimental aspects of amatory experience. During this period, we see two important and simultaneous developments: Latin love elegy crystallizes as a poetic genre, while a new style in Roman wall painting emerges. Valladares' book is the first to correlate these two phenomena properly, showing that they are deeply intertwined. Rather than postulating a direct correspondence between images and texts, she offers a series of mutually reinforcing readings of painting and poetry that ultimately locate the invention of a new romantic ideal within early imperial debates about domesticity and the role of citizens in Roman society.

Scholars have been seeking to understand Sophocles' Antigone for over two millennia. The origins of this long tradition of the play's interpretation are now represented mainly by a series of notes that have survived in the margins of medieval manuscripts. The book offers an English introduction and an authoritative critical text, which is accompanied by a detailed apparatus criticus.

Cutting-edge and fresh new outlooks on medieval literature, emphasising the vibrancy of the field. New Medieval Literatures is an annual of work on medieval textual cultures, aiming to engage with intellectual and cultural pluralism in the Middle Ages and now. Its scope is inclusive of work across the theoretical, archival, philological, and historicist methodologies associated with medieval literary studies, and embraces the range of European cultures, capaciously defined. Essays in this volume engage with a wide range of subject matter, from as far back as Livy (d.c.AD 12/18) to Erwin Panofsky (d. 1968). They demonstrate that medieval textual cultures is a radically negotiable category and that medieval understandings of the past were equally diverse and unstable.They reflect on relationships between history, texts, and truth from a range of perspectives, from Foucault to "truthiness", a twenty-first-century media coinage. Materiality and the technical crafts with which humans engage withthe natural world are recurrent themes, opening up new insights on mysticism, knighthood, and manuscript production and reception. Analysis of manuscript illuminations offers new understandings of identity and diversity, while a survey of every thirteenth-century manuscript that contains English currently in Oxford libraries yields a challenging new history of script. Particular texts discussed include Chretien de Troyes's Conte du Graal, Richard Rolle's Incendium amoris and Melos amoris, and the Middle English verse romances Lybeaus Desconus, The Erle of Tolous, Amis and Amiloun, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

The last decades have seen a lively interest in Roman verse satire, and this collection of essays introduces the reader to the best of modern critical writing on Persius and Juvenal. The eight articles on Persius range from detailed analyses of his fine technique to readings inspired by theoretical approaches such as New Historicism, Reader-Response Criticism, and Dialogics. The nine selections on Juvenal focus upon the pivotal question in modern Juvenalian criticism: how serious is the poet when he voices his appallingly misogynist, homophobic, and xenophobic moralism? The contributors challenge the straightforward equivalence of author and speaker in a variety of ways, and they also point up the technical aspects of Juvenal's art. Three papers have been newly translated for this volume, and all Latin quotations are also given in English. A specially written Introduction provides a useful conspectus of recent scholarship.

Thomas Hahn's work laid the foundations for medieval romance studies to embrace the study of alterity and hybridity within Middle English literature. His contributions to scholarship brought Robin Hood studies into the critical mainstream, normalized the study of historically marginalized literature and peoples, and encouraged scholars to view medieval readers as actively encountering others and exploring themselves. This volume employs his methodologies - careful attention to texts and their contexts, cross-cultural readings, and theoretically-informed analysis - to highlight the literary culture of late medieval England afresh. Addressing long-established canonical works such as Chaucer, Christine de Pizan, and Malory alongside understudied traditions and manuscripts, this book will be of interest to literary scholars of the later Middle Ages who, like Hahn, work across boundaries of genre, tradition, and chronology.