Why is Old English poetry so preoccupied with mental actions and perspectives, giving readers access to minds of antagonists as freely as to those of protagonists? Why are characters sometimes called into being for no apparent reason other than to embody a psychological state? Britt Mize provides the first systematic investigation into these salient questions in Traditional Subjectivities. Through close analysis of vernacular poems alongside the most informative analogues in Latin, Old English prose, and Old Saxon, this work establishes an evidence-based foundation for new thinking about the nature of Old English poetic composition, including the 'poetics of mentality' that it exhibits. Mize synthesizes two previously disconnected bodies of theory - the oral-traditional theory of poetic composition, and current linguistic work on conventional language - to advance our understanding of how traditional phraseology makes meaning, as well as illuminate the political and social dimensions of surviving texts, through attention to Old English poets' impulse to explore subjective perspectives.

The poetry of the archaic poets of Lesbos, Sappho and Alcaeus, has been imperfectly and poorly transmitted either in book fragments or in later ragged papyri, so that new attempts of interpretation will always be required, especially when new research tools and methods have appeared in classical scholarship. The book consists of 14 articles by the author, which present and deal with diverse problems of the two poets of Lesbos. Various questions on already transmitted poems, different readings, reconstructions, and interpretations of the new finds are proposed, but, most importantly, new approaches in general topics, such as the division of Sappho's work in Books, the logic leading to this division, the order of these Books, the contents of each of them, the interpretation of the surviving fragments, often quite different than before. A feature that characterizes the old-age poetry of Sappho is her anxiety about the posthumous fate of her poetry and her hope that Kleis, her only daughter, will ensure its dissemination. Finally, the author investigates the communal festival of Hera in Lesbos, a festival performed in common with Zeus and Dionysus, the so-called "Lesbian Triad". The festival is specified as a welcome to the season of spring at the time of the vernal equinox. Also, the location of the temenos of Hera is investigated, close to Pyrrha of Lesbos, which was the site of Alcaeus' second exile.

Lucretius' account of the origin of life, the origin of species, and human prehistory (first century BC) is the longest and most detailed account extant from the ancient world. It is a mechanistic theory that does away with the need for any divine design, and has been seen as a forerunner of Darwin's theory of evolution. This commentary seeks to locate Lucretius in both the ancient and modern contexts. The recent revival of creationism makes this study particularly relevant to contemporary debate, and indeed, many of the central questions posed by creationists are those Lucretius attempts to answer.

For the Anglo-Saxons, Latin was a language of choice that revealed a multitude of beliefs and desires about themselves as subjects, believers, scholars, and artists. In this groundbreaking collection, ten leading scholars explore the intersections between identity and Latin language and literature in Anglo-Saxon England. Ranging from the works of the Venerable Bede and St Boniface in the eighth century to Osbern's account of eleventh-century Canterbury, Latinity and Identity in Anglo-Saxon Literature offers new insights into the Anglo-Saxons' ideas about literary form, monasticism, language, and national identity. Latin prose, poetry, and musical styles are reconsidered, as is the relationship between Latin and Old English. Monastic identity, intertwined as it was with the learning of Latin and reformation of the self, is also an important theme. By offering fresh perspectives on texts both famous and neglected, Latinity and Identity will transform readers' views of Anglo-Latin literature.

Drawing on Arabic, English, French, Irish, Latin and Spanish sources, the essays share a focus on the body's productive capacity - whether expressed through the flesh's materiality, or through its role in performing meaning. The collection is divided into four clusters. 'Foundations' traces the use of physical remnants of the body in the form of relics or memorial monuments that replicate the form of the body as foundational in communal structures; 'Performing the Body' focuses on the ways in which the individual body functions as the medium through which the social body is maintained; 'Bodily Rhetoric' explores the poetic linkage of body and meaning; and 'Material Bodies' engages with the processes of corporeal being, ranging from the energetic flow of humoural liquids to the decay of the flesh. Together, the essays provide new perspectives on the centrality of the medieval body and underscore the vitality of this rich field of study.

Holding divine intervention responsible for political and military success and failure has a long history in western thought. This book explores the idea of providential history as an organizing principle for understanding the divine purpose for humans in texts that may be literary, historical, philosophical, and theological.
"
Providential History" shows that, with Virgil and the Bible as authoritative precursors to late antique views on history, the two most important political thinkers of the late antique Christian world, Orosius and Augustine, produced the theories of Christian politics and history that were carried over into the first and second millennium of Christianity. Likewise, their understanding of how the history of the late Roman Empire connects to God's plan for humankind became the background for understanding Dante's own positions in the "Monarchia "and the "Commedia."
Brenda Deen Schildgen examines Dante's engagement with these authoritative sources, whether in biblical, ancient Roman writers, or the specific legacy of Orosius and Augustine.

The medical literature of ancient Greece has been much studied during the 20th century, particularly from the 1970s on. In spite of this intense activity, the search for manuscripts still relies on the catalogue compiled in the early 1900s by a group of philologists led by the German historian of Greek philosophy and medicine Hermann Diels. However useful the so-called Diels has been and still is, it is now in need of a thorough revision. The present five-tome set is a first step in that direction. Tome 1 offers a reproduction of Diels' catalogue with an index of the manuscripts. The following three tomes provide a reconstruction of the texts contained in the manuscripts listed in Diels on the basis of Diels' catalogue. Proceeding as Diels did, these three tomes distinguish the manuscripts containing texts by (or attributed to) Hippocrates (tome 2), Galen (tome 3), and the other authors considered by Diels (tome 4). Tome 5 will list all the texts listed in Diels for each manuscript in the catalogue. The present work will be a reference for all scholars interested in Greek medical literature and manuscripts, in addition to historians of medicine, medical book, medical tradition, and medical culture.

The encounter between Muslim and Hindu remains one of the defining issues of South Asian society today. This encounter began as early as the 8th century, and the first Muslim kingdom in India would be established at the end of the 12th century. This powerful kingdom, the Sultanate of Delhi, eventually reduced to vassalage almost every independent kingdom on the subcontinent. In Love's Subtle Magic, a remarkable and deeply original book, Aditya Behl uses a little-understood genre of Sufi literature to paint an entirely new picture of the evolution of Indian culture during the earliest period of Muslim domination. These curious romantic tales transmit a deeply serious religious message through the medium of lighthearted stories of love. Although composed in the Muslim courts, they are written in a vernacular Indian language. Until now, they have defied analysis, and been mostly ignored by scholars east and west. Behl shows that the Sufi authors of these charming tales purposely sought to convey an Islamic vision via an Indian idiom. They thus constitute the earliest attempt at the indigenization of Islamic literature in an Indian setting. More important, however, Behl's analysis brilliantly illuminates the cosmopolitan and composite culture of the Sultanate India in which they were composed. This in turn compels us completely to rethink the standard of the opposition between Indian Hindu and foreign Muslim and recognize that the Indo-Islamic culture of this era was already significantly Indian in many important ways.

What was Roman political praise for and what could it achieve? Could it have literary merit? What do the surviving examples of Roman political praise-giving reveal about the circumstances and milieu in which they originated?
Latin Panegyric brings together sixteen essays focusing on praise in the Roman Empire and, in particular, on praise of the emperor. Spanning a century of scholarship, and constituting landmark studies on different aspects of the largest collection of classical Latin oratory to survive after Cicero--the Panegyrici Latini--this collection includes speeches addressed to the emperors Trajan, Maximian, Constantine, Julian, and Theodosius, and traces three centuries of oratorical praise-giving in the Roman world. These influential readings consider textual, rhetorical, literary, political, and religious matters, and together represent the evolving landscape of academic attitudes towards praise discourse, with its strengths and problems, and towards some of the best-known Roman emperors. With a full introduction by the editor, and with four essays translated into English for the first time, this valuable volume plots the narratives of Roman praise and gives students of classical literature, history, and rhetoric direct access to key scholarship.

Karl Valentin once asked: "How can it be that only as much happens as fits into the newspaper the next day?" He focussed on the problem that information of the past has to be organised, arranged and above all: selected and put into form in order to be perceived as a whole. In this sense, the process of selection must be seen as the fundamental moment - the "Urszene" - of making History. This book shows selection as highly creative act. With the richness of early medieval material it can be demonstrated that creative selection was omnipresent and took place even in unexpected text genres. The book demonstrates the variety how premodern authors dealt with "unimportant", unpleasant or unwanted past. It provides a general overview for regions and text genres in early medieval Europe.

Key aspects of philhellenism - political self-determination, freedom, beauty, individual greatness - originate in antiquity and present a complex reception history. The force of European philhellenism derives from ancient Roman idealizations, which have been drawn on by European movements since the Enlightenment. How is philhellenism able to transcend national, cultural and epochal limits? The articles collected in this volume deal with (1) the ancient conceptualization of philhellenism, (2) the actualization and politicization of the term at the time of the European Restoration (1815-30), and (3) the transformation of philhellenism into a pan-European movement. During the Greek struggle for independence the different receptions of philhellenism regain a common focus; philhellenism becomes an inextricable element in the creation of a pan-European identity and a starting point for the regeneration and modernization of Greece. - It is easy to criticize the tradition of philhellenism as being simplistic, naive, and self-serving, but there is an irreducibly utopian element in later philhellenic idealizations of ancient Greece.

This multi-authored volume, by an authoritative team of international scholars, examines the transmission of Ciceronian rhetoric in medieval and early Renaissance Europe, concentrating on the fortunes, in particular, of the two dominant classical rhetorical textbooks of the time, Cicero's early De inventione, and the contemporary 'pseudo-Ciceronian' Rhetorica ad Herennium. The volume is unprecedented in range and depth as a presentation of the place of classical rhetoric in medieval culture, and will serve to revise views of a period seen until recently as largely indifferent to the values of 'eloquence'. The main body of the volume is composed of a series of ground-breaking studies of the relationship between Ciceronian rhetoric and a wide range of intellectual traditions and cultural practices, including dialectic, law, conduct theory, memory, poetics and practical composition teaching, preaching, ars dictaminis, and political oratory. Also included are important contextualizing essays on the commentary tradition of the Ciceronian juvenilia, on the textual history and manuscript transmission of Cicero's rhetorical works, and on the Latin and vernacular traditions of Ciceronian rhetoric in Italy. The volume concludes with an annotated appendix of illustrative texts containing extracts from the commentary tradition on Ciceronian rhetoric, most of which have not been previously available in print. Originally published in hardcover

This study argues that, in early medieval South India, it was in the literary arena that religious ideals and values were publicly contested. While Tamil-speaking South India is today celebrated for its preservation of Hindu tradition, non-Hindu religious communities have played a significant role in shaping the religious history of the region. Among the least understood of such non-Hindu contributions is that of the Buddhists, who are little understood because of the scarcity of remnants of Tamil-speaking Buddhist culture. However, the two exant Buddhist texts in Tamil that are complete - a sixth-century poetic narrative known as the Manimekalai and an eleventh-century treatise on grammar and postics, the Viracoliyam - reveal a wealth of information about their textual communities and their vision of Buddhist life in a diverse and competitive religious milieu. By focusing on these texts, Monius sheds light on their role of literature and literary culture in the information, articulation, and evolution of religious identity and community.

This book affords new perspectives on urban disasters in the ancient Roman context, attending not just to the material and historical realities of such events, but also to the imaginary and literary possibilities offered by urban disaster as a figure of thought. Existential threats to the ancient city took many forms, including military invasions, natural disasters, public health crises, and gradual systemic collapses brought on by political or economic factors. In Roman cities, the memory of such events left lasting imprints on the city in psychological as well as in material terms. Individual chapters explore historical disasters and their commemoration, but others also consider of the effect of anticipated and imagined catastrophes. They analyze the destruction of cities both as a threat to be forestalled, and as a potentially regenerative agent of change, and the ways in which destroyed cities are revisited - and in a sense, rebuilt- in literary and social memory. The contributors to this volume seek to explore the Roman conception of disaster in terms that are not exclusively literary or historical. Instead, they explore the connections between and among various elements in the assemblage of experiences, texts, and traditions touching upon the theme of urban disasters in the Roman world.

Based on the conviction that only translators who write poetry themselves can properly re-create the celebrated and timeless tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the Greek Tragedy in New Translations offers new translations that go beyond the literal meaning of the Greek in order to evoke the poetry of the originals.
Collected here for the first time in the series are four major works by Euripides all set in Athens: Hippoltos, translated by Robert Bagg, a dramatic interpretation of the tragedy of Phaidra; Suppliant Women, translated by Rosanna Warren and Steven Scully, a powerful examination of the human psyche; Ion, translated by W. S. Di Piero and Peter Burian, a complex enactment of the changing relations between the human and divine orders; and The Children of Herakles, translated by Henry Taylor and Robert A. Brooks, a descriptive tale of the descendants of Herakles and their journey home. These four tragedies were originally avialble as single volumes. This volume retains the informative introductions and explanatory notes of the original editions and adds a single combines glossary and Greek line numbers.

Ovid's Fasti, based on the festivals of the Roman year, is a brilliantly varied and original poem by one of the world's greatest storytellers, written in the late years of the emperor Augustus and cut short (only six books of the planned twelve were written) when the emperor sent the poet into exile. Its tone ranges from tragedy to farce, and its subject matter from astronomy and obscure ritual to Roman history and Greek mythology. Among the stories Ovid tells at length are Arion and the dolphin, the rape of Lucretia, the adventures of Dido's sister, the Great Mother's journey to Rome, the killing of Remus, the bloodsucking birds, and the murderous daughter of King Servius. The poem has been unjustly neglected until recently, and this accurate prose translation into modern English, with a scene-setting Introduction, will enable readers to appreciate its subtleties.

This volume collects fifteen landmark essays published over the last three decades by the distinguished medievalist Jill Mann. Bringing together her essays on Chaucer, the Gawain-poet, and Malory, the collection foregrounds the common interest in the semantic implications of key vocabulary such as "authority," "adventure," and "price" that links them together.

Mann, one of the finest critics of Middle English literature in her generation, uses the concepts suggested by the language of medieval literature itself as a way into the masterpieces of Middle English, including The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the Morte Darthur.

An extended introduction by Mark Rasmussen brings out the nature of the themes that run through the collection, analyses the critical methods in play, and assesses their significance in the context of Middle English studies over the last thirty years.

Medieval European literature was once thought to have been isolationist in its nature, but recent scholarship has revealed the ways in which Spanish and Italian authors - including Cervantes and Marco Polo - were influenced by Arabic poetry, music, and philosophy. A Sea of Languages brings together some of the most influential scholars working in Muslim-Christian-Jewish cultural communications today to discuss the convergence of the literary, social, and economic histories of the medieval Mediterranean. This volume takes as a starting point Maria Rosa Menocal's groundbreaking work The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History, a major catalyst in the reconsideration of prevailing assumptions regarding the insularity of medieval European literature. Reframing ongoing debates within literary studies in dynamic new ways, A Sea of Languages will become a critical resource and reference point for a new generation of scholars and students on the intersection of Arabic and European literature.

Arguing that the consecrated body in the Eucharist is one of the central metaphors structuring The Divine Comedy, this book is the first comprehensive exploration of the theme of transubstantiation across Dante's epic poem. Drawing attention first to the historical and theological tensions inherent in ideas of transubstantiation that rippled through Western culture up to the early fourteenth century, Sheila Nayar engages in a Eucharistic reading of both the "flesh" allusions and "metamorphosis" motifs that thread through the entirety of Dante's poem. From the cannibalistic resonances of the Ugolino episode in the Inferno to the Corpus Christi-like procession seminal to Purgatory, Nayar demonstrates how these sacrifice- and Host-related metaphors, allusions, and tropes lead directly and intentionally to the Comedy's final vision, that of the Eucharist itself. Arguing that the final revelation in Paradise is analogically "the Bread of Life," Nayar brings to the fore Christ's centrality (as sacrament) to The Divine Comedy-a reading that is certain to alter current-day thinking about Dante's poem.

Today medievalism is increasingly intelligible as a cultural lingua franca, produced in trans- and international contexts with a view to reaching popular international audiences, some of mass scope. This book offers new perspectives on international relations and how global concerns are made available through contemporary medievalist texts. It questions how research in medievalism may help us rethink the terms of internationalism and globalism within popular cultures, ideologies, and political formations. It investigates how the diverse media of medievalism (print; film and television; arts and crafts; fashion; digital media; clubs and fandom) affect its cultural meaning and circulation, and its social function, and engage questions of desire, gender and identity construction. As a whole, International Medievalism and Popular Culture differs from those studies which have concentrated on imaginative appropriations of the middle ages for domestic cultural contexts. It investigates rather how contemporary cultures engage with medievalism to map and model ideas of the international, the trans-national, the cosmopolitan and the global. This book includes examples from Europe, Britain, North America, Australia and the Arab world. It discusses the formation and the impact of popular medievalism in the globalised worlds of Braveheart, Disney and Harry Potter, but it also explores how the contemporary medieval imaginary generates international cultural perspectives, for example in considering Middle Eastern reception of Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven, the Byzantinism of Julia Kristeva, and Hedley Bull's postnationalist 'new medievalism'. International Medievalism in Popular Culture is an important contribution to medieval studies, cultural studies, and historical studies. It will be of value to undergraduate, postgraduate and academic readers, as well as to all interested in popular culture or medievalism.

"Les provencalistes sont gens heureux" scriveva Charles Samaran, fornendo, nella prima annata da lui diretta della "Bibliotheque de l'Ecole des Chartes" (96, 1935), una breve notizia della Bibliographie des manuscrits litteraires en ancien provencal di Clovis Brunel, ancora fresca di stampa. E spiegava le ragioni di questa fortuna: "Leur domaine est vaste, mais non demesure. Ils peuvent, sans tomber dans le decouragement, en denombrer les richesses; ils peu-vent aussi revenir de temps en temps sur les repertoires existants pour les ameliorer encore.""

In Narratives of Kingship in Eurasian Empires, 1300-1800 Richard van Leeuwen analyses representations and constructions of the idea of kingship in fictional texts of various genres, especially belonging to the intermediate layer between popular and official literature. The analysis shows how ideologies of power are embedded in the literary and cultural imagination of societies, their cultural values and conceptualizations of authority. By referring to examples from various empires (Chinese, Indian, Persian, Arabic, Turkish, European) the parallels between literary traditions are laid bare, revealing remarkable common concerns. The process of interaction and transmission are highlighted to illustrate how literature served as a repository for ideological and cultural values transforming power into authority in various imperial environments.

This volume presents a series of essays published by Charles Kahn over a period of forty years, in which he seeks to explicate the ancient Greek concept of Being. He addresses two distinct but intimately related problems, one linguistic and one historical and philosophical. The linguistic problem concerns the theory of the Greek verb einai, "to be:: how to replace the conventional but misleading distinction between copula and existential verb with a more adequate theoretical account. The philosophical problem is in principle quite distinct: to understand how the concept of Being became the central topic in Greek philosophy from Parmenides to Aristotle. But these two problems converge on what Kahn calls the veridical use of einai. In the earlier papers he takes that connection between the verb and the concept of truth to be the key to the central role of Being in Greek philosophy. In the later papers he interprets the veridical in terms of a more general semantic function of the verb, which comprises the notions of existence and instantiation as well as truth.

The purpose of this book is to illustrate that reading is a subjective process which results in multivalent interpretations. This is the case whether one looks at a text in its historical contexts (the diachronic approach) or its literary contexts (the synchronic approach). Three representative biblical texts are chosen: from the Law (Genesis 2-3), the Writings (Isaiah 23) and the Prophets (Amos 5), and each is read first by way of historical analysis and then by literary analysis. Each text provides a number of variant interpretations and raises the question, is any one interpretation superior? What criteria do we use to measure this? Or is there value in the complementary nature of many approaches and many results?