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 epics of the three Flavian poets-Silius Italicus, Statius, and Valerius Flaccus-have, in recent times, attracted the attention of scholars, who have re-evaluated the particular merits of Flavian poetry as far more than imitation of the traditional norms and patterns. Drawn from sixty years of scholarship, this edited collection is the first volume to collate the most influential modern academic writings on Flavian epic poetry, revised and updated to provide both scholars and students alike with a broad yet comprehensive overview of the field. A wide range of topics receive coverage, and analysis and interpretation of individual poems are integrated throughout. The plurality of the critical voices included in the volume presents a much-needed variety of approaches, which are used to tackle questions of intertextuality, gender, poetics, and the social and political context of the period. In doing so, the volume demonstrates that by engaging in a complex and challenging intertextual dialogue with their literary predecessors, the innovative epics of the Flavian poets respond to contemporary needs, expressing overt praise, or covert anxiety, towards imperial rule and the empire.

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

The Oxford History of Classical Reception (OHCREL), of which the present volume is the first to appear, is designed to offer a comprehensive investigation of the numerous and diverse ways in which literary texts of the classical world have been responded to and refashioned by English writers. Covering the full range of English literature from the early Middle Ages to the present day, OHCREL both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge new research, employing an international team of expert contributors for each of the volumes. OHCREL endeavours to interrogate, rather than inertly reiterate, conventional assumptions about literary 'periods', the processes of canon-formation, and the relations between literary and non-literary discourse. It conceives of 'reception' as a complex process of dialogic exchange and, rather than offering large cultural generalizations, it engages in close critical analysis of literary texts. It explores in detail the ways in which English writers' engagement with classical literature casts as much light on the classical originals as it does on the English writers' own cultural context. When completed, this 5-volume history will be one of the largest, and potentially most important projects, in the field of classical reception ever undertaken. This third volume covers the years 1660-1790.

The Utopia Reader compiles primary texts from a variety of authors and movements in the history of theorizing utopias. Utopianism is defined as the various ways of imagining, creating, or analyzing the ways and means of creating an ideal or alternative society. Prominent writers and scholars across history have long explored how or why to envision different ways of life. The volume includes texts from classical Greek literature, the Old Testament, and Plato's Republic, to Sir Thomas More's Utopia, to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and beyond. By balancing well-known and obscure examples, the text provides a comprehensive and definitive collection of the various ways Utopias have been conceived throughout history and how Utopian ideals have served as criticisms of existing sociocultural conditions. This new edition includes many historically well-known works, little known but influential texts, and contemporary writings, providing an even more expansive coverage of the varieties of approaches and responses to the concept of utopia in the past, present, and even the future. In particular, the volume now includes feminist writings and work by authors of color, and contends with current concerns, such as the exploration of the ecological ideals of Utopia. Furthermore, Claeys and Sargent highlight twenty-first century trends and popular narrative explorations of Utopias through the genres of young adult dystopias, survivalist dystopias, and non-print utopias. Covering a range of original theories of utopianism and revealing the nuances and concerns of writers across history as they attempt to envision different, ideal societies, The Utopia Reader is an essential resource for anyone who envisions a better future.

The aesthetic changes in late Roman literature speak to the foundations of modern Western culture. The dawn of a modern way of being in the world, one that most Europeans and Americans would recognize as closely ancestral to their own, is to be found not in the distant antiquity of Greece nor in the golden age of a Roman empire that spanned the Mediterranean, but more fundamentally in the original and problematic fusion of Greco-Roman culture with a new and unexpected foreign element-the arrival of Christianity as an exclusive state religion. For a host of reasons, traditionalist scholarship has failed to give a full and positive account of the formal, aesthetic and religious transformations of ancient poetics in Late Antiquity. The Poetics of Late Latin Literature attempts to capture the excitement and vibrancy of the living ancient tradition reinventing itself in a new context in the hands of a series of great Latin writers mainly from the fourth and fifth centuries AD. A series of the most distinguished expert voices in later Latin poetry as well as some of the most exciting new scholars have been specially commissioned to write new papers for this volume.

A close examination of the prayers in Chaucer's poetry sheds significant new light on his poetic practice. In a culture as steeped in communal, scripted acts of prayer as Chaucer's England, a written prayer asks not only to be read, but to be inhabited: its "I" marks a space that readers are invited to occupy. This book examines the implications of accepting that invitation when reading Chaucer's poetry. Both in his often-overlooked pious writings and in his ambitious, innovative pagan narratives, the "I" of prayer provides readers with a subject-position thatcan be at once devotional and literary - a stance before a deity and a stance in relation to a poem. Chaucer uses this uniquely open, participatory "I" to implicate readers in his poetry and to guide their work of reading. In examining Christian and pagan prayers alongside each other, Chaucer's Prayers cuts across an assumed division between the "religious" and "secular" writings within Chaucer's corpus. Rather, it emphasizes continuities andapproaches prayer as part of Chaucer's broader experimentation with literary voice. It also places Chaucer in his devotional context and foregrounds how pious practices intersect with and shape his poetic practices. These insightschallenge a received view of Chaucer as an essentially secular poet and shed new light on his poetry's relationship to religion.

Lysistrata is the most notorious of Aristophanes' comedies. First staged in 411 BCE, its action famously revolves around a sex strike launched by the women of Greece in an attempt to force their husbands to end the war. With its risque humour, vibrant battle of the sexes, and themes of war and peace, Lysistrata remains as daring and thought-provoking today as it would have been for its original audience in Classical Athens. Aristophanes: Lysistrata is a lively and engaging introduction to this play aimed at students and scholars of classical drama alike. It sets Lysistrata in its social and historical context, looking at key themes such as politics, religion and its provocative portrayal of women, as well as the play's language, humour and personalities, including the formidable and trailblazing Lysistrata herself. Lysistrata has often been translated, adapted and performed in the modern era and this book also traces the ways in which it has been re-imagined and re-presented to new audiences. As this reception history reveals, Lysistrata's appeal in the modern world lies not only in its racy subject matter, but also in its potential to be recast as a feminist, pacifist or otherwise subversive play that openly challenges the political and social status quo.

Newly Recovered English Classical Translations, 1600-1800 is a unique resource: a volume presenting for the first time a wide-ranging collection of never-before-printed English translations from ancient Greek and Latin verse and drama of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Transcribed and edited from surviving manuscripts, these translations open a window onto a period in which the full richness and diversity of engagement with classical texts through translation is only now becoming apparent. Upwards of 100 identified translators and many more anonymous writers are included, from familiar and sometimes eminent figures to the obscure and unknown. Since very few of them expected their work to be printed, these translators often felt free to experiment, innovate, or subvert established norms. Their productions thus shed new light on how their source texts could be read. As English verse they hold their ground remarkably well against the printed translations of the time, and regularly surpass them. The more than 300 translations included here, from epigrams to (selections from) epics, are richly informative about the reception of classical poetry and drama in this crucial period, copiously augmenting and sometimes challenging the narratives suggested by the more familiar record of printed translations. This edition will prove to have far-reaching implications for the history both of classical reception and of English translation - a phenomenon central to English literary endeavour for much of this era.

Who was Homer? This book takes us beyond the legends of the blind bard or the wandering poet to explore an author about whom nothing is known, except for his works. It offers a reading of the ancient biographies as clues to the reception of the Homeric poems in Antiquity and provides an introduction to the oral tradition which lay at the source of the Homeric epics. Above all, it takes us into the world of the Odyssey, a world that lies between history and fiction. It guides the reader through a poem which rivals the modern novel in its complexity, demonstrating the unity of the poem as a whole. It defines the many and varied figures of otherness by which the Greeks of the archaic period defined themselves and underlines the values promoted by the poem's depictions of men, women, and gods. Finally, it asks why, throughout the centuries from Homer to Kazantzakis and Joyce, the hero who never forgets his homeland and dreams constantly of return has never ceased to be the incarnation of what it is to be human.
This translation is a revised and much expanded version of the original French text, and includes a new chapter on the representation of women in the Odyssey and an updated bibliography.

The Bible played a crucial role in shaping Anglo-Saxon national and cultural identity. However, access to Biblical texts was necessarily limited to very few individuals in Medieval England. In this book, Samantha Zacher explores how the very earliest English Biblical poetry creatively adapted, commented on and spread Biblical narratives and traditions to the wider population. Systematically surveying the manuscripts of surviving poems, the book shows how these vernacular poets commemorated the Hebrews as God's 'chosen people' and claimed the inheritance of that status for Anglo-Saxon England. Drawing on contemporary translation theory, the book undertakes close readings of the poems Exodus, Daniel and Judith in order to examine their methods of adaptation for their particular theologico-political circumstances and the way they portray and problematize Judaeo-Christian religious identities.

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.

The aim of this project is to provide a sustained analysis of the concept of 'self' in Statius' Thebaid. It is this project's contention that the poem is profoundly interested in ideas of identity and selfhood. The poem stages itself as a metapoetic exploration of the difficulties for a belated epicist in finding a place in the literary canon; it shows the impossibility of squaring large-scale epic poetics with small-scale, finely-wrought Callimacheanism; it reflects the violent disjunction between Statius' authorial pose as a poet without power and the extreme violence of his poetics; it opens up the intricacies of constructing original, coherent characters out of intertextual, exemplary models. The central tenet of the project is that Statius in the Thebaid stages his own 'death', but does so that his poem may live. This book is intended for an academic audience including undergraduate and graduate students as well as specialists in the field. Although the project will be of primary importance to readers of Flavian literature, it will also be of interest to those who study intertextuality and characterisation in Roman literature more generally, selfhood and identity in Roman literature and culture and the reception of Roman literature.

This volume of collected essays focuses on Middle Turkic and Ottoman literature.

Every era has invented a different idea of the 'classical' to create its own identity. Thus the 'classical' does not concern only the past: it is also concerned with the present and a vision of the future.

In this elegant new book, Salvatore Settis traces the ways in which we have related to our 'classical' past, starting with post-modern American skyscrapers and working his way back through our cultural history to the attitudes of the Greeks and Romans themselves.

Settis argues that this obsession with cultural decay, ruins and a 'classical' past is specifically European and the product of a collective cultural trauma following the collapse of the Roman Empire. This situation differed from that of the Aztec and Inca empires whose collapse was more sudden and more complete, and from the Chinese Empire which always enjoyed a high degree of continuity. He demonstrates how the idea of the 'classical' has changed over the centuries through an unrelenting decay of 'classicism' and its equally unrelenting rebirth in an altered form.

In the Modern Era this emulation of the 'ancients' by the 'moderns' was accompanied by new trends: the increasing belief that the former had now been surpassed by the latter, and an increasing preference for the Greek over the Roman. These conflicting interpretations were as much about the future as they were about the past. No civilization can invent itself if it does not have other societies in other times and other places to act as benchmarks.

Settis argues that we will be better equipped to mould new generations for the future once we understand that the 'classical' is not a dead culture we inherited and for which we can take no credit, but something startling that has to be re-created every day and is a powerful spur to understanding the 'other'.

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.

Compunction was one of the most important emotions for medieval Christianity; in fact, through its confessional function, compunction became the primary means for an affective sinner to gain redemption. Cultures of Compunction in the Medieval World explores how such emotion could be expressed, experienced and performed in medieval European society. Using a range of disciplinary approaches - including history, philosophy, art history, literary studies, performance studies and linguistics - this book examines how and why emotions which now form the bedrock of modern western culture were idealized in the Middle Ages. By bringing together expertise across disciplines and medieval languages, this important book demonstrates the ubiquity and impact of compunction for medieval life and makes wider connections between devotional, secular and quotidian areas of experience.

In the Middle Ages, the life story of Alexander the Great was a well-traveled tale. Known in numerous versions, many of them derived from the ancient Greek Alexander Romance, it was told and re-told throughout Europe, India, the Middle East, and Central Asia. The essays collected in Alexander the Great in the Middle Ages examine these remarkable legends not merely as stories of conquest and discovery, but also as representations of otherness, migration, translation, cosmopolitanism, and diaspora. Alongside studies of the Alexander legend in medieval and early modern Latin, English, French, German, and Persian, Alexander the Great in the Middle Ages breaks new ground by examining rarer topics such as Hebrew Alexander romances, Coptic and Arabic Alexander materials, and early modern Malay versions of the Alexander legend. Brought together in this wide-ranging collection, these essays testify to the enduring fascination and transcultural adaptability of medieval stories about the extraordinary Macedonian leader.

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 sources and context 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.

The purpose of this book is to examine the variety, the mechanisms, and the poetological intention of the effect of surprise in Aristophanic comedy, addressing the phenomenon not as a self-evident or unselfconscious element of comedy as a genre, but as an elaborate system which characterises the style of the specific dramatist. More precisely, the book analyses Aristophanes' most prominent verbal, thematic, and theatrical modes of surprise from a typological perspective, and interprets them as comprising the key area in which the playwright claims and demonstrates his artistic superiority over rival genres and individual poets. In line with this purpose, two parallel aims of the book are to provide an original commentary on the passages under examination, and to promote the study of modern performances - a practice which has so far been either restricted to Classical Reception or only theoretically acknowledged (if at all) by mainstream philological scholarship. This is a timely book on a topic of wide current interest across a range of interlocking disciplines: emotion studies, semiotics, narratology, information theory, and -most pertinently for this book- humour research.