The purpose of this book is to contribute to the appreciation of the linguistic, literary and contextual value of Homeric personal names. This is an old topic, which famously interested Plato, and an object of constant scholarly attention from the time of ancient commentators to the present day. The book begins with an introduction to the particularly complex set of factors that affect all efforts to interpret Homeric names. The main chapters are structured around the character and action of selected heroes in their Homeric contexts (in the case of the Iliad, a heroic war; the Odyssey chapter encompasses more than one planes of action). They offer a survey of modern etymologies, set against ancient views on names and naming, in order to reconstruct (as far as possible) the reception of significant names by ancient audiences and further to shed light on the parameters surrounding the choice and use of personal names in Homer. An Appendix touches on the underexplored career of Homeric personal names as historical names, offering data and a preliminary analysis.

Greek tragedy occupies a prominent place in the development of early Greek thought. However, even within the partial renaissance of debates about tragedy's roots in the popular thought of archaic Greece, its potential connection to the early philosophical tradition remains, with few exceptions, at the periphery of current interest. This book aims to show that our understanding of Aeschylus' Oresteia is enhanced by seeing that the trilogy's treatment of Zeus and Justice (Dike) shares certain concepts, assumptions, categories of thought, and forms of expression with the surviving fragments and doxography of certain Presocratic thinkers (especially Anaximander, Xenophanes, Heraclitus, and Parmenides). By examining several aspects of the tragic trilogy in relation to Presocratic debates about theology and cosmic justice, it shows how such scrutiny may affect our understanding of the theological 'tension' and metaphysical assumptions underpinning the Oresteia's dramatic narrative. Ultimately, it argues that Aeschylus bestows on the experience of human suffering, as it is given in the contradictory multiplicity of the world, the status of a profound form of knowledge: a meeting point between the human and divine spheres.

Aristophanes' Peace was performed at the City Dionysia in Athens in 421 BC as a decade-long war with Sparta seemed finally to be drawing to an end, and is one of only eleven extant plays by the greatest Old Comic poet. Olson's edition of the play, which replaces Platnauer's of 1969, is based on a complete new collation of the manuscripts, many of which have never been adequately reported before. The extensive commentary explores matters of all sorts, but it focuses in particular on the realities of day-to-day life in classical Athens and also examines the practical problems of staging. The substantial introduction includes essays on Aristophanes' early career, the politics of the Greek world in the late 420s, and the poet's theology.

This anthology reproduces six plays based on stories of King Arthur from a variety of periods. Originally published in 1991, it offers a comprehensive discussion of Arthurian Drama in introduction and also provides an appendix listing printed scripts in English that address Arthurian legend.

Originally published in 1988, this volume contains papers from, and commissioned after, "The Passing of Arthur", a conference on Medieval and Renaissance Studies in November 1986. No Arthurian story is experienced without some foreknowledge of its end, which the text acknowledges through a complex range of methods. This collection takes this as its point of origin, suggesting that all such narratives concern the passing of Arthur, even indirectly, so the chapters not only look at the death of Arthur but the passing on and development of the Arthurian literature. The figure of Arthur and the Round Table continues to fascinate contemporary readers. This interesting collection presents a wide range of Arthurian studies approaches representing some of the vast scholarship on the genre.

First Published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book examines William Langland's late medieval poem, The Vision of Piers Plowman, in light of contemporary intellectual thought. David Strong argues that where the philosophers John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham revolutionize the view of human potential through their theories of epistemology, ethics, and freedom of the will, Langland vivifies these ideas by contextualizing them in an individual's search for truth and love. Specifically, the text ponders the intersection between reason and the will in expressing love. While scholars have consistently noted the text's indebtedness to these higher strains of thought, this is the first book-length study in over thirty years that explores the depth of this interconnection, and the only one that considers the salience of both Scotus and Ockham. It is essential reading for medieval literary specialists and students as well as any cultural historian who desires to augment their knowledge of truth and love.

This translation of Lancelot del Lac was published in 1929 to present easily the essential parts of the history of Sir Lancelot from three thirteenth century romances - Le livre de Lancelot del Lac, Le queste del saint graal, and La mort le roi Artus. The translator summarises the sections not fully translated to link the sections together. This was the first serious attempt to produce a modern English rendering of the French material, as Malory used a relatively small portion of the French trilogy in writing Morte Darthur.

While most work on Dionysus is based on Greek sources, this collection of essays examines the god's Roman and Italian manifestations. Nine contributions address Bacchus' appearance at the crossroads of Greek and Roman cultures, tracing continuities and differences between literary and archaeological sources for the god. The essays offer coverage of Dionysus in Roman art, Italian epigraphy; Latin poetry including epic, drama and elegy; and prose, including historiography, rhetorical and Christian discourse. The introduction offers an overview of the presence of Dionysus in Italy from the archaic to the imperial periods, identifying the main scholarly trends, with treatment of key Dionysian episodes in Roman history and literature. Individual chapters address the reception of Euripides' Bacchae across Greek and Roman literature from Athens to Byzantium; Dionysus in Roman art of the archaic and Augustan periods; the god's relationship with Fufluns and Liber in the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE; Dionysian associations; Bacchus in Cicero; Ovid's Tristia 5.3; Bacchus in the writings of Christian Latin writers. The collection sheds light on a relatively understudied aspect of Dionysus, and will stimulate further research in this area.

Discrete inquiries into 15 forms of the Arthurian legends produced over the last century explore how they have altered the tradition. They consider works from the US and Europe, and those aimed at popular and elite audiences. The overall conclusion is that the "Arthurian revival" is an ongoing event, and has become multivalent, multinational, and multimedia. Originally published in 1992.

First published in 1992. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Originally published in 1996, the articles in this book are revised, expanded papers from a session at the 17th International Congress of the Arthurian Society held in 1993. The chapters cover Arthurian studies' directions at the time, showcasing analysis of varied aspects of visual representation and relation to literary themes. Close attention to the historical context is a key feature of this work, investigating the linkage between texts and images in the Middle Ages and beyond.

This book, first published in 1958, aims to describe Greek art and poetry within this ambiguous period of ancient history (often referred to as the Greek 'Dark Ages'), and to explore the possibilities of learning about Mycenaean civilisation from its own documents and not only from archaeology. Specifically, Webster utilises Michael Ventris' decipherment of Linear B in 1952 - which proved that Greek was spoken in the Mycenaean world - to determine the general contours of aesthetic development from Mycenae to the time of the written composition of the Homeric epics. Because they record Mycenaean civilisation in Mycenaean terminology, while Homer was writing in Ionian Greek at the beginning of the polis civilisation, they show how much in Homer is in fact Mycenaean. Further, where it is clear that these Mycenaean elements cannot have survived until Homer's time, they tell us something about the poetry which connected the two.

The focus of this book is medieval vernacular literature in Western Europe. Chapters are written by experts in the area and present the current scholarship at the time this book was originally published in 1996. Each chapter has a bibliography of important works in that area as well. This is a thorough and reliable guide to trends in research on medieval Arthuriana.

Aeschylus' Oresteia, Sophocles' Oedipus plays, Euripides' Medea and Bacchae, and Aristophanes' Birds and Lysistrata are discussed in this lively and scholarly volume. The author's experience teaching these plays to gifted high school students makes this volume particularly useful. The drama festivals, the adaptations of myth, the relevance of Aristotelian criteria, and the political and cultural background of each play are described fully, and the nature of tragedy and comedy, plot construction, stagecraft, theme, character, imagery and individual odes and speeches are analyzed in depth. The 5th century BC witnessed the flourishing of Athenian culture and was one of the most influential periods in history. The achievements of the Greeks at that time forever shaped our political and legal institutions and provided the foundation for Western civilization. At the same time, the world of the Greeks is distant and exotic to contemporary students. The values and beliefs of the Greeks are best represented in the plays that were crafted at that time, and these works continue to be widely read and studied. This book is a valuable introduction to ancient Greek drama. Designed for high school students, undergraduates, and their teachers, this work describes the origins and physical aspects of ancient Greek theatre, discusses Aristotle's Poetics, and analyzes, in ten separate chapters, ten frequently studied Greek plays: Aeschylus' Oresteia, Sophocles' Antigone, Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus, Euripides' Medea and Bacchae and Aristophanes' Birds and Lysistrata. For each there is cultural, political and mythological background, plot synopsis, and analysis of overall structure and importantscenes, speeches and odes. The Aristophanes chapters explore comic method and all chapters discuss theme and stagecraft in depth.

A growing interest in myth over the last decades has brought to the fore the main mythographical manual that has came down to us from Antiquity: Apollodorus' Bibliotheca. A number of recent editions shows this trend, like the commented translations of Carriere & Massonie (1991) and Scarpi & Ciani (1996), the translations of Guidorizzi (1995), Brodersen (2004), Drager (2005) and Smith & Trzaskoma (2007) or the critical text by Papathomopoulos (2010). The publication of the first two volumes (2010 and 2012) of Cuartero's massive critical and commented bilingual edition for the Fundacio Bernat Metge series seemed the occasion to address this text from innovative scholarly perspectives. The origins of the present volume lay in a colloquium held at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona in 2013. Despite its crucial interest for the scientific study of ancient myth, no conference devoted to this engaging text was held prior to that one. And, to this date, no monographic volume on Apollodorus' mythology exists either. To cover a broader scope of analysis, three further papers have been commissioned to other specialists. This collection of essays is meant to be a homage to Francesc J. Cuartero.

This new edition of mythological poems from the Poetic Edda takes the reader deep into the imagination of the Viking poets (c.1000 AD). Text and translation are set side by side. The poetry is interpreted and its qualities discussed in full introductions and commentaries for each of the poems.

This book is about the complex ways in which science and literature are mutually-informing and mutually-sustaining. It does not cast the literary and the scientific as distinct, but rather as productively in-distinct cultural practices: for the two dozen new essays collected here, the presiding concern is no longer to ask how literary writers react to scientific writers, but rather to study how literary and scientific practices are imbricated. These specially-commissioned essays from top scholars in the area range across vast territories and produce seemingly unlikely unions: between physics and rhetoric, math and Milton, Boyle and the Bible, plague and plays, among many others. In these essays so-called scientific writing turns out to traffic in metaphor, wit, imagination, and playfulness normally associated with literature provides material forms and rhetorical strategies for thinking physics, mathematics, archeology, and medicine.

The Horatian formula prodesse et delectare was extremely influential in the production of texts across various languages and genres. While indeed didactic elements can be attested to in almost any medieval text, and while medieval literature displays a range of possibilities to teach and instruct, the scope of the present volume is more closely focused on explicitly didactic literature. This volume combines contributions that analyse didactic literature in high medieval Europe from different vantage points. They open new perspectives on education as a working principle or legitimizing strategy in the heterogeneous forms of writing intended to convey knowledge. This broad thematic, linguistic and geographical scope enables us to view didactic literature as the universal phenomenon it was and prompts us to understand its influence on many aspects of society in high medieval Europe and beyond. While the contributions explore case studies predominantly from this period of transition and the expansion of the categories of knowledge, they also trace some of these developments into the later Middle Ages to spotlight the lasting influence of high medieval teaching and learning in literature. The way medieval writers combine 'the pleasant' with 'the useful' is this book's main question.

Ambiguity in the sense of two or more possible meanings is considered to be a distinctive feature of modern art and literature. It characterizes the "open artwork" (Eco) and is generated by "disruptive tactics" (Wellershoff) and strategies to engender uncertainty. While ambiguity is seen as a "paradigm of modernity" (Bode), there is skepticism regarding its use in the pre-modern era. Older studies were dominated by the conviction that there was a lack of ambiguity in pre-modernity because, according to the rules of the "old rhetoric", ambiguity was seen as an avoidable error (vitium) and a violation of the dictate of clarity (perspicuitas). The aim of the volume is to re-examine the putative "absence of ambiguity" in the pre-modern era. Is it not possible to find clear examples of deliberately employed (intended) ambiguity in antiquity? Are the oracles and riddles, the Palinode of Stesichoros and Socrates (Phaedrus), the dissoi logoi of rhetoric, the ambiguities of the tragedies all exceptions or do they not indicate a distinct interest in the artistic use of ambiguity? The presentations of the conference, which will include scholars from various philologies, will combine a recourse to theoretical concepts of intended ambiguity with exemplary analyses from the field of pre-modern art and literature.

This book traces the development of the ideal of sincerity from its origins in Anglo-Saxon monasteries to its eventual currency in fifteenth-century familiar letters. Beginning by positioning sincerity as an ideology at the intersection of historical pragmatics and the history of emotions, the author demonstrates how changes in the relationship between outward expression and inward emotions changed English language and literature. While the early chapters reveal that the notion of sincerity was a Christian intervention previously absent from Germanic culture, the latter part of the book provides more focused studies of contrition and love. In doing so, the author argues that under the rubric of courtesy these idealized emotions influenced English in terms of its everyday pragmatics and literary style. This fascinating volume will be of broad interest to scholars of medieval language, literature and culture.

Jan Huizinga and Roger Caillois have already taught us to realize how important games and play have been for pre-modern civilization. Recent research has begun to acknowledge the fundamental importance of these aspects in cultural, religious, philosophical, and literary terms. This volume expands on the traditional approach still very much focused on the materiality of game (toys, cards, dice, falcons, dolls, etc.) and acknowledges that game constituted also a form of coming to terms with human existence in an unstable and volatile world determined by universal randomness and fortune. Whether considering blessings or horse fighting, falconry or card games, playing with dice or dolls, we can gain a much deeper understanding of medieval and early modern society when we consider how people pursued pleasure and how they structured their leisure time. The contributions examine a wide gamut of approaches to pleasure, considering health issues, eroticism, tournaments, playing music, reading and listening, drinking alcohol, gambling and throwing dice. This large issue was also relevant, of course, in non-Christian societies, and constitutes a critical concern both for the past and the present because we are all homines ludentes.