For a long time studies on northern antiquarianism have focused on individual nations. This volume introduces this phenomenon in a transnational perspective. In the course of the 17th and 18th centuries, the Baltic Sea was at the centre of a culture of debate, whose networks encompassed numerous European centres of learning. When the countries around the Baltic began to explore their own antiquities in this period, the prevailing climate of competition between Sweden, Denmark, Russia and the German countries soon permeated the construction and presentation of their own pasts. Exploring the ancient literatures and monuments of Iceland, Sweden or Denmark, studying runic writings or the Sami tradition, the northern scholars were establishing an individual architecture of history, and so extending the horizon of their emerging nations both geographically and historically. The contributions in this volume provide case studies illustrating the role that scholarship, art and literature played in establishing and maintaining national claims around the Baltic Sea. The variety of methods combined for this purpose makes this book of interest to intellectual historians as well as historians of art and early modern science.

The most passionate, individual, and controversial of the Latin love elegists, Propertius in Book 3 covers a broad range of subject matter and a vast geographical reach. After books focused on his mistress Cynthia, he maintains his elegiac role but expands his range to provide a lover's commentary on life, discussing luxury, nudity, art, the empire, and the dangers of travel for profit and war. This detailed commentary uses the text recently published in the Oxford Classical Texts series, and sets out to build on the richness of the material in the book by providing clear introductions to the genres the poems explore - the Greek elegy of Callimachus, epic, tragedy, hymn and epigram - and to topics such as patronage, philosophy, and the images of love as slavery and as warfare.

This book presents an introduction to the key texts and historical, cultural and critical contexts of medieval romance. "Medieval English Romance in Context" is a clear, accessible and concise introduction to medieval English verse romantic texts and their wider contexts. It begins by introducing key issues and events that impacted on romance writing and its reception such as chivalric ideals, the Black Death, wars and 'Englishness' as well as key literary issues such as medieval manuscript production and its transmission. Close readings of key texts - including "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight", Breton lays and Chaucer's "The Man of Law's Tale" - highlight generic features and issues like family drama, space and time, and nationhood. The final section introduces key critical interpretations from different perspectives including gender and queer theory, and post-colonialism in medieval studies. A chapter on afterlives and adaptations explores reinterpretations of medieval romance and the Arthurian cycles in a range of popular texts and narratives from Doctor Who to Batman. 'Review, Reading and Research' sections give suggestions for further reading, discussion and research. Introducing texts, contexts and criticism, this is a lively and up-to-date resource for anyone studying Medieval English Romance. "Texts and Contexts" is a series of clear, concise and accessible introductions to key literary fields and concepts. The series provides the literary, critical, historical context for texts and authors in a specific literary area in a way that introduces a range of work in the field and enables further independent study and reading.

The complex matter of Orphism has so far been addressed by scholars through studies focusing on one of its components each time, primarily the Derveni Papyrus and the Gold Tablets while the text of the Orphic Rhapsodies has remained under-examined mostly due to its fragmentary nature and the lack of a reconstruction. This book brings all of the major components of Orphism together in one study, in this way highlighting both parallels and divergences between them, and a wide range of non-Orphic sources referring to Orphic practices, beliefs and texts. For the complete analysis of the Orphic Rhapsodies a reconstruction of the text was necessary, which is included in this book along with a commentary and translation. This work proposes a new definition of Orphism and it can constitute a whole-encompassing and concise guide for scholars and students interested in Orphism. The reconstruction of the Orphic Rhapsodies could also contribute on shifting the understanding of this work to new perspectives as it demonstrates that the Orphic Rhapsodies was a more complex text rather than a single continuous theogonic narrative as has been approached up to this date.

A detailed examination of Proverbs 1-9, an early Jewish poetic work. Stuart Weeks incorporates studies of literature from ancient Egypt and from the Dead Sea scrolls, but his focus is on the background and use of certain key images in the text. Proverbs 1-9 belongs to an important class of biblical literature (wisdom literature), and is less well known as a whole than the related books of Job and Ecclesiastes, partly because it has been viewed until recently as a dull and muddled school-book. However, parts of it have been profoundly influential on the development of both Judaism and Christianity, and occupy a key role in modern feminist theology. Weeks demonstrates that those parts belong to a much broader and more intricate set of ideas than older scholarship allowed.

A close analysis of the Republic s diverse literary styles shows how the peculiarities of verbal texture in Platonic discourse can be explained by Plato s remolding of tropes and techniques from poetry and the Presocratics. This book argues that Plato smuggles poetic language into the Republic s prose in order to characterize the deceitful coloration and polymorphy that accompanies the world of Becoming as opposed to the Real. Plato s distinctive discourse thus can transmit, even to those figures focused on the visual within his Republic, the shiftiness of the base and the unjust."

Although it seems that erotic love generally was the prevailing topic in the medieval world and the Early Modern Age, parallel to this the Ciceronian ideal of friendship also dominated the public discourse, as this collection of essays demonstrates. Following an extensive introduction, the individual contributions explore the functions and the character of friendship from Late Antiquity (Augustine) to the 17th century. They show the spectrum of variety in which this topic appeared? not only in literature, but also in politics and even in painting.

The original essays in Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature mean to provoke rather than reassure, to challenge rather than codify. Instead of summarizing existing knowledge scholars working in the field aim at opening fresh discussion; instead of emphasizing settled consensus they direct their readers to areas of enlivened and unresolved debate.
The deepest periodic division in English literary history has been between the Medieval and the Early Modern, not least because the cultural investments in maintaining that division are exceptionally powerful. Narratives of national and religious identity and freedom; of individual liberties; of the history of education and scholarship; of reading or the history of the book; of the very possibility of persuasive historical consciousness itself: each of these narratives (and more) is motivated by positing a powerful break around 1500.
None of the claims for a profound historical and cultural break at the turn of the fifteenth into the sixteenth centuries is negligible. The very habit of working within those periodic bounds (either Medieval or Early Modern) tends, however, simultaneously to affirm and to ignore the rupture. It affirms the rupture by staying within standard periodic bounds, but it ignores it by never examining the rupture itself. The moment of profound change is either, for medievalists, just over an unexplored horizon; or, for Early Modernists, a zero point behind which more penetrating examination is unnecessary. That situation is now rapidly changing. Scholars are building bridges that link previously insular areas. Both periods are starting to look different in dialogue with each other.
The change underway has yet to find collected voices behind it. Cultural Reformations volume aims to provide those voices. It will give focus, authority, and drive to a new area.

Polemon of Laodicea (near modern Denizli, south-west Turkey) was a wealthy Greek aristocrat and a key member of the intellectual movement known as the Second Sophistic. Among his works was the Physiognomy, a manual on how to tell character from appearance, thus enabling its readers to choose friends and avoid enemies on sight. Its formula of detailed instruction and personal reminiscence proved so successful that the book was re-edited in the fourth century by Adamantius in Greek, translated and adapted by an unknown Latin author of the same era, and translated in the early Middle Ages into Syriac and Arabic. The surviving versions of Adamantius, Anonymus Latinus, and the Leiden Arabic more than make up for the loss of the original.
The present volume is the work of a team of leading Classicists and Arabists. The main surviving versions in Greek and Latin are translated into English for the first time. The Leiden Arabic translation is authoritatively re-edited and translated, as is a sample of the alternative Arabic Polemon. The texts and translations are introduced by a series of masterly studies that tell the story of the origins, function, and legacy of Polemon's work, a legacy especially rich in Islam. The story of the Physiognomy is the story of how one man's obsession with identifying enemies came to be taken up in the fascinating transmission of Greek thought into Arabic.

This book critically explores the development of radical criminology through a range of written Ancient Greek works including epic and lyrical poetry, drama and philosophy, across different chapters. It traces the development of political power and the concepts of law, legitimacy, crime, justice and deviance in the Ancient Greek world and the political struggles that propelled that development, using the conflict perspective as a conceptual tool of the sociological analysis of reality. Theoretical discussions of crime and justice typically stem from the better known works of Plato or Aristotle although this book explores the works preceding these. This book will appeal to those interested in the (pre)history of criminology and the historical production of criminological knowledge.

This volume examines the issue of violence in Xenophon's works, who lived in circumstances of war for many years. All the papers address issues of violence from different aspects. The exclusive focus on this issue is justified, since no previous detailed study exists on the subject. Most of the chapters focus on the Hellenica, because this work records more aspects of violence than the rest of his works. The volume is more concerned with examining violence in practice rather than the theory of violence, and violent practices are more frequently recorded in the Hellenica, which is the main historical work of Xenophon.This volume attempts to provide a comprehensive study of the subject of violence in Xenophon's works and to demonstrate the coherence and consistency of his thought on it. This work aspires to be a contribution to classical scholarship since it attempts to: (1) shed further light on the literary character of Xenophon's oeuvre; (2) offer new interpretation of passages and themes; and (3) put emphasis on passages that scholars have not pointed out and which offer important insights to the thought of Xenophon.

Lively and deeply productive discussions have focused on the topics of "magnificence" and "the sublime" in the art and literature of antiquity, the Renaissance, and the ages following. They have engaged major figures from Ernst Gombrich to Theodore Adorno to Jean-Francois Lyotard. Yet, these discussions have virtually bypassed the Middle Ages. The essays in "Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics" reclaim a position for the medieval period in the theoretical discussion of art, architecture, music, and literature. These analyses of an aesthetic of grandeur show an artistic practice in the Middle Ages that strove for and celebrated grand effects.

This book explores the ramifications of understanding the similarities and differences between the tragedies of Euripides and Sophocles and realistic Japanese noh. First, it looks at the relationship of Aristotle s definition of tragedy to the tragedies he favored. Next, his definition is applied to realistic noh, in order to show how they do and do not conform to his definition. In the third and fourth chapters, the focus moves to those junctures in the dramas that Aristotle considered crucial to a complex plot - recognitions and sudden reversals -, and shows how they are presented in performance. Chapter 3 examines the climactic moments of realistic noh and demonstrates that it is at precisely these moments that a third actor becomes involved in the dialogue or that an actor in various ways steps out of character. Chapter 4 explores how plays by Euripides and Sophocles deal with critical turns in the plot, as Aristotle defined it. It is not by an actor stepping out of character, but by the playwright s involvement of the third actor in the dialogue. The argument of this book reveals a similar symbiosis between plot and performance in both dramatic forms. By looking at noh through the lens of Aristotle and two Greek tragedies that he favored, the book uncovers first an Aristotelian plot structure in realistic noh and the relationship between the crucial points in the plot and its performance; and on the Greek side, looking at the tragedies through the lens of noh suggests a hitherto unnoticed relationship between the structure of the tragedies and their performance, that is, the involvement of the third actor at the climactic moments of the plot. This observation helps to account for Aristotle s view that tragedy be limited to three actors."

This major study of a Markan genre, represented in the central section 8.27-10.4, ranges through Greek, rabbinic and early Christian literature, providing detailed comparison with the anecdotes in Lucian's Demonax and the Mishnah.Moeser concludes that the Markan anecdotes clearly follow the definition of, and typologies for, the Greek chreia. His analysis indicates that while the content of the three sets of anecdotes is peculiar to its respective cultural setting, the Greek, Jewish and Christian examples all function according to the purposes of the genre.

Die Bibliotheca Teubneriana, gegrundet 1849, ist die weltweit alteste, traditionsreichste und umfangreichste Editionsreihe griechischer und lateinischer Literatur von der Antike bis zur Neuzeit. Pro Jahr erscheinen 4-5 neue Editionen. Samtliche Ausgaben werden durch eine lateinische oder englische Praefatio erganzt. Die wissenschaftliche Betreuung der Reihe obliegt einem Team anerkannter Philologen: Gian Biagio Conte (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa) Marcus Deufert (Universitat Leipzig) James Diggle (University of Cambridge) Donald J. Mastronarde (University of California, Berkeley) Franco Montanari (Universita di Genova) Heinz-Gunther Nesselrath (Georg-August-Universitat Goettingen) Oliver Primavesi (Ludwig-Maximilians Universitat Munchen) Michael D. Reeve (University of Cambridge) Richard J. Tarrant (Harvard University) Vergriffene Titel werden als Print-on-Demand-Nachdrucke wieder verfugbar gemacht. Zudem werden alle Neuerscheinungen der Bibliotheca Teubneriana parallel zur gedruckten Ausgabe auch als eBook angeboten. Die alteren Bande werden sukzessive ebenfalls als eBook bereitgestellt. Falls Sie einen vergriffenen Titel bestellen moechten, der noch nicht als Print-on-Demand angeboten wird, schreiben Sie uns an: [email protected] Samtliche in der Bibliotheca Teubneriana erschienenen Editionen lateinischer Texte sind in der Datenbank BTL Online elektronisch verfugbar.

Considering the ubiquity of rhetorical training in antiquity, the volume starts from the premise that every first-person statement in ancient literature is in some way rhetorically modelled and aesthetically shaped. Focusing on different types of Greek and Latin literature, poetry and prose, from the Archaic Age to Late Antiquity, the contributions analyse the use and modelling of gender-specific elements in different types of first-person speech, be it that the speaker is (represented as) the author of a work, be it that they feature as characters in the work, narrating their own story or that of others. In doing so, they do not only offer new insights into the rhetorical strategies and literary techniques used to construct a gendered 'I' in ancient literature. They also address the form and function of first-person discourse in classical literature in general, touching on fields of research that have increasingly come into focus in recent years, such as authorship studies, studies concerning the ancient notion(s) of the literary persona, as well as a historical narratology that discusses concepts such as the narrator or the literary character in ancient literary theory and practice.

In his first book of "Satires," written in the late, violent days of the Roman republic, Horace exposes satiric speech as a tool of power and domination. Using critical theories from classics, speech act theory, and others, Catherine Schlegel argues that Horace's acute poetic observation of hostile speech provides insights into the operations of verbal control that are relevant to his time and to ours. She demonstrates that though Horace is forced by his political circumstances to develop a new, unthreatening style of satire, his poems contain a challenge to our most profound habits of violence, hierarchy, and domination. Focusing on the relationships between speaker and audience and between old and new style, Schlegel examines the internal conflicts of a notoriously difficult text. This exciting contribution to the field of Horatian studies will be of interest to classicists as well as other scholars interested in the genre of satire.

There is little doubt that sympathy plays a pivotal role in aesthetic as well as moral experience, yet also little agreement on how to describe this connection and its long history. This volume investigates the changes in the concept of sympathy as well as its rhetorical, poetical and ethical functions from antiquity to the threshold of Romanticism. The focus is on sympathy's development from a cosmological principle expressing the coherence, correspondence, and unity of all things into a theoretical key concept of intersubjectivity informing moral philosophy, criticism and literature. Thus, Sympathy in Transformation offers important insights into the many ways in which, when sympathy migrates into diverse discourses in Early Modernity, its ancient origins dwindle out of sight, while some of its central elements re-emerge in a surprising manner.

In the newly-identified genre of medieval patience literature, female protagonists move to the center of the action-an unusual advance for medieval literature. In addition, the patience genre shifts from one mainly concerned with mimicry to one mainly concerned with reduplication, so that fresh interpretations of early medieval works can arise and exciting revisions to genre-theory can develop, often from a surprisingly feminist point of view. As a result, this book helps to redress popular notions of the Middle Ages as a time when women had 'no rights' and 'no voices' and were treated as mere sex objects and as the property of men.

"Antigone" is Sophocles' masterpiece, a seminal influence on a wide range of theatrical, literary, and intellectual traditions all over the world. This volume sets the play in the contexts of its ancient mythical background, its original circumstances of performance, its relation to the culture and thought of contemporary Athens, and the rich and complicated history of its reception. But its main aim is to encourage readers to engage with the text at first hand and to appreciate the inexhaustible richness that makes this play in particular so hard to pin down, so enduringly thought-provoking, and hence so rewarding to study. Though Creon's actions prove disastrous and Antigone's are vindicated, the "Antigone" (it is argued) is no simple study in the excesses of tyranny or the virtues of heroic resistance, but a more complex and nuanced exploration of conflicting views of right and wrong and of the conditions that constrain human beings' efforts to control their own destinies and secure their own happiness.The book's chapters consider the extent of the original audience's acquaintance with earlier versions of the legends of Antigone's family, the structure of the plot as it unfolds in theatrical performance, the presentation of the characters and the motivations that drive them, the major political, social, and ethical themes that the play raises, and the resonance of those themes in the ways that the play has been interpreted, adapted, performed, and appropriated in later periods.

Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Translation of Female Kingship provides the first feminist analysis of the part of The History of the Kings of Britain that most readers overlook: the reigns before and after Arthur's. Fiona Tolhurst demonstrates that Geoffrey not only creates precedents for the future reign of Empress Matilda in England but also presents female rule as an attractive and beneficial alternative to male immorality and incompetence. Her study adds a new dimension to contemporary scholarship by proposing that the word 'feminist' can be used to describe this history that - in contrast to the works of Geoffrey's predecessors, redactors, and early translators - presents female rule positively.

Close Relationships is Geert Jan van Gelder's groundbreaking and comprehensive study of the diverse facts and opinions found in pre-modern Arabic texts - both literary and non-literary - concerning incest and inbreeding resulting from repeated close-kin marriage. The pre-Islamic Bedouin Arabs knew about the dangers of human inbreeding, yet by the time the Prophet Muhammed is said to have warned Marry strangers, then you will not produce stunted offspring marrying one's father's brother's daughter had traditionally been the preferred choice in order to keep wealth and marriage in the same family. The Qur'an laid down the basic rules of marriage impediments, which, uniquely, include not only blood-relationships but also milk-relationships i.e. being suckled by the same woman. Later generations of jurists and exegetes elaborated and discussed these rules; some of them tried to justify and explain the prohibitions, mostly in ethical and social rather than in biological terms. legends, creation stories (Adam and Eve's children), dream interpretation, and polemics with other religions or ethnic groups. In particular, the Zoroastrian Persians, who allegedly recommended next-of-kin marriage in pre-Islamic times, were attacked. Van Gelder acknowledges that while it is dangerous to make general assertions about the difference between Western and Arab or Middle Eastern customs and attitudes, he argues that the theme of incest, so prominent at least in European literature since the Greek myths, is somewhat marginal in Arabic literature. Many of the relevant passages have been translated into English specially for this richly documented book that will be of interest not only to philologists and students of Arabic literature or Islamic culture but also to the general reader interested in the history of incest and inbreeding and attitudes towards these closely related concepts.

A comprehensive introduction to the medieval languages and texts that inspired Tolkien's Middle-earth. Using key episodes in The Silmarillion , The Hobbit , and The Lord of the Rings , medieval texts are presented in their original language with translations. Essential for those who wish to delve deeper into the background to Tolkien's mythology.

Ever since Karl Jasper's "axial age" paradigm, there have been a number of influential studies comparing ancient East Asian and Greco-Roman history and culture. Most of these have centered on the emergence of the world's philosophical and religious traditions, or on models of empire building. However, to date there has been no comparative study involving literatures of multiple traditions in the ancient East Asian and Mediterranean cultural spheres. At first glance, it would appear that the literary cultures of early Japan and Rome share little in common with each other. Yet both were intimately connected with the literature of antecedent "reference cultures," China and Greece respectively. These connections had far-reaching legal, ethical, material, linguistic, bibliographical, and literary consequences that made for distinctive Sino-Japanese and Greco-Roman dynamics. Exploring writers from Otomo no Yakamochi to Sugawara no Michizane and Sei Shonagon and from Cicero and Virgil to Ovid and Martianus Capella, Classical World Literatures captures the striking similarities between the ways Early Japanese writers wrote their own literature through and against the literary precedents of China and the ways Latin writers engaged and contested Greek precedents. Chapters engage in issues ranging from early narratives of literary history, cultural foundation figures, literature of the capital and poetry of exile, to strategies of cultural comparison in the form of parody and satire or synoptic texts. The book also brings to light suggestive divergences that are rooted in geopolitical, linguistic, sociohistorical, and aesthetic differences between Early Japanese and Roman literary cultures. Author Wiebke Denecke examines how Japanese and Latin writers were affected by an awareness of their own belatedness, how their strategies in telling of the origins of their own literatures evolved, and how notions about simplicity, ornateness, and cultural decline came to be blamed on the influence of their cultural ancestors. Proposing an innovative methodology of "deep comparison" for the cross-cultural comparison of premodern literary cultures and calling for an expansion of world literature debates into the ancient and medieval worlds, Classical World Literatures is both a theoretical intervention and an invitation to reading and re-reading four major literary traditions of the classical world in an innovative and illuminating light.