In medieval Japan (14th-16th centuries), it was customary for elite families to entrust their young sons to the care of renowned Buddhist priests from whom they received a premier education in Buddhist scriptures, poetry, music, and dance. When the boys reached adolescence, some underwent coming-of-age rites, others entered the priesthood, and several extended their education, becoming chigo, or Buddhist acolytes. Chigo served their masters as personal attendants and as sexual partners. During religious ceremonies-adorned in colorful robes, their faces made up and hair styled in long ponytails-they entertained local donors and pilgrims with music and dance. Stories of acolytes (chigo monogatari) from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries form the basis of the present volume, an original and detailed literary analysis of six tales coupled with a thorough examination of the sociopolitical, religious, and cultural matrices that produced these texts. Sachi Schmidt-Hori begins by delineating various dimensions of chigo (the chigo "title," personal names, gender, sexuality, class, politics, and religiosity) to show the complexity of this cultural construct-the chigo as a triply liminal figure who is neither male nor female, child nor adult, human nor deity. A modern reception history of chigo monogatari follows, revealing, not surprisingly, that the tales have often been interpreted through cultural paradigms rooted in historical moments and worldviews far removed from the original. From the 1950s to 1980s, research on chigo was hindered by widespread homophobic prejudice. More recently, aversion to the age gap in historical master-acolyte relations has prevented scholars from analyzing the religious and political messages underlying the genre. Schmidt-Hori's work calls for a shift in the hermeneutic strategies applied to chigo and chigo monogatari and puts forth both a nuanced historicization of social constructs such as gender, sexuality, age, and agency, and a mode of reading propelled by curiosity and introspection.

This book presents a translation of and detailed commentary on Galen's De alimentorum facultatibus - his major work on the dynamics and kinetics of various foods. It is thus primarily a physiological treatise rather than a materia medica or a work on pathology. Galen commences with a short section on the epistemology of medicine, with a discussion on the attainment, through apodeixis or demonstration, of scientific truth - a discussion which reveals the Aristotelian roots of his thinking. The text then covers a wide range of foods, both common and exotic. Some, such as cereals, legumes, dairy products and the grape, receive an emphasis that reflects their importance at the time; others are treated more cursorily. Dr Powell, an expert in gastroenterology, discusses Galen's terminology and the background to his views on physiology and pathology in his introduction, while John Wilkins' foreword concentrates on the structural and cultural aspects of the work.

Perhaps no other single Roman speech exemplifies the connection between oratory, politics and imperialism better than Cicero's De Provinciis Consularibus, pronounced to the senate in 56 BC. Cicero puts his talents at the service of the powerful "triumviri" (Caesar, Crassus and Pompey), whose aims he advances by appealing to the senators' imperialistic and chauvinistic ideology. This oration, then, yields precious insights into several areas of late republican life: international relations between Rome and the provinces (Gaul, Macedonia and Judaea); the senators' view on governors, publicani (tax-farmers) and foreigners; the dirty mechanics of high politics in the 50s, driven by lust for domination and money; and Cicero's own role in that political choreography. This speech also exemplifies the exceptional range of Cicero's oratory: the invective against Piso and Gabinius calls for biting irony, the praise of Caesar displays high rhetoric, the rejection of other senators' recommendations is a tour de force of logical and sophisticated argument, and Cicero's justification for his own conduct is embedded in the self-fashioning narrative which is typical of his post reditum speeches. This new commentary includes an updated introduction, which provides the readers with a historical, rhetorical and stylistic background to appreciate the complexities of Cicero's oration, as well as indexes and maps.

This book argues that Chaucer challenges his culture's mounting obsession with vision through his varied constructions of masculinity. Because medieval theories of vision relied upon distinctions between active and passive seers and viewers, optical discourse had social and moral implications for gender difference in late fourteenth-century England. By exploring ocularity's equal dependence on "invisibility," Chaucer offers men and women access to a vision of "manhed," one that fragments a traditional gender binary by blurring its division between agency and passivity.

At the centre of the commentary on Book 19 of the Iliad is the interpretation of speeches and events at the assembly of the Achaean army. It is here that the argument between Achilles and Agamemnon was settled, thus enabling the Achaeans to take the field in the decisive battle against Hector and the Trojans.

Absent Narratives, Manuscript Textuality, and Literary Structure in Late Medieval England is a book about the defining difference between medieval and modern stories. In chapters devoted to the major writers of the late medieval period--Chaucer, Gower, the Gawain-poet and Malory--it presents and then analyzes a set of unique and unnoticed phenomena in medieval narrative, namely the persistent appearance of missing stories: stories implied, alluded to, or fragmented by a larger narrative. Far from being trivial digressions or passing curiosities, these "absent narratives" prove central to the way these medieval works function and to why they have affected readers in particular ways. Traditionally unseen, ignored, or explained away by critics, absent narratives offer a valuable new strategy for reading medieval texts and the historically specific textual culture in which they were written.

Andersen-Wyman's book undoes most scholarly uses and understandings of De amore by Andreas Capellanus. By offering a reading promoted by the text itself, Andersen-Wyman shows how Andreas undermines the narrative foundations of sacred and secular institutions and renders their power absurd.

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 series offers new translations that go beyond the literal meaning of the Greek in order to evoke the poetry of the originals.
This volume collects Euipides' Alcestis (translated by William Arrowsmith), a subtle drama about Alcestis and her husband Admetos, which is the oldest surviving work by the dramatist; Medea (Michael Collier and Georgia Machemer), a moving vengeance story and an excellent example of the prominence and complexity that Euripides gave to female characters; Helen (Peter Burian), a genre breaking play based on the myth of Helen in Egypt; and Cyclops (Heather McHugh and David Konstan), a highly lyrical drama based on a celebrated episode from the Odyssey. This volume retains the informative introductions and explanatory notes of the original editions and adds a single combined glossary and Greek line numbers.

* This book offers an exciting examination of the theatrical functions of medieval English stage directions as records of earlier performance. * Would be recommended reading in for any undergraduate or master's level students studying the medieval period in Performance studies, English Literature or in History (in particular in the UK and the US). * The closest competitors focus on after 1560 so this project is a first in its time period coverage.

"Chaucerian Aesthetics" examines "The Canterbury Tale" and "Troilus and Criseyde" from both medieval and post-Kantian vantage points. These sometimes congruent, sometimes divergent perspectives illuminate both the immediate pleasure of encountering beauty and its haunting promise of intelligibility. Although aesthetic reflection has sometimes seemed out of sync with modern approaches to mind and language, Knapp defends its value in general and demonstrates its importance for the analysis of Chaucer's narrative art. Focusing on language games, persons, women, humor, and community, this book ponders what makes art beautiful.

"Maintenance, Meed, and Marriage in Medieval English Literature "deftly interrogates the relationship between lord and man in medieval England. Employing the study of medieval analogies this book""is the first to explore how the relationship between lords and retainers was depicted in literature by Chaucer, Gower, Langland, and Lydgate. Kennedy uses close readings and medieval letter collections to provide a documentary look at how lords and men communicated information about their relationships and reveals surprising information about both medieval law and society.

Working at the intersection of medical, theological, cultural, and literary studies, Marking Maternity offers an innovative approach to understanding maternity, genealogy, and social identity as they are represented in popular literature in late-medieval England. This book examines how Middle English romances have come to reflect the impact of dominant contemporary discourses of maternal influence and contamination upon individuals, communities, and families. Angela Florschuetz goes onto argue while these romances often reference and participate in contemporary discourses that identify the maternal with contamination, they also reframe the problem of maternal influence by focusing on the corrosive effects of these anxieties upon all levels of society.

This book provides a collection of essays representing the state of the art in the research into argumentation in classical antiquity. It contains essays from leading and up and coming scholars on figures as diverse as Parmenides, Gorgias, Seneca, and Classical Chinese "wandering persuaders." The book includes contributions from specialists in the history of philosophy as well as specialists in contemporary argumentation theory, and stimulates the dialogue between scholars studying issues relating to argumentation theory in ancient philosophy and contemporary argumentation theorists. Furthermore, the book sets the direction for research into argumentation in antiquity by encouraging an engagement with a broader range of historical figures, and closer collaboration between contemporary concerns and the history of philosophy.

"Strange Beauty" brings the developing discipline of environmental literary criticism to bear on narratives of nature and the Otherworld from early cultures around the Irish Sea. Reflecting on an Otherworld associated with human experience, Siewers uses texts such as the Ulster Cycle and the "Mabinogi" to relate views of nature, symbolism and language. This book uncovers early syntheses of Christian and indigenous Insular cultures which express an integration of the spiritual and physical landscapes that are marginalized in later medieval thought. "Strange Beauty "opens a window on distinctive alternative views of the relation of culture to nature still relevant today.

This collection of essays provides the first comprehensive critical study of women as subjects and creators of medieval and early modern Scottish writing between the early fifteenth and late seventeenth centuries. Essays examine canonical and non-canonical literary, historiographical, and religious texts written in the Scots, Gaelic, and English languages. Challenging the received literary and cultural history of medieval and early modern Scotland, this volume brings to texts and writers, both established and newly discovered, a range of new theoretical approaches

The Bibliotheca Teubneriana, established in 1849, has evolved into the world's most venerable and extensive series of editions of Greek and Latin literature, ranging from classical to Neo-Latin texts. Some 4-5 new editions are published every year. A team of renowned scholars in the field of Classical Philology acts as advisory board: 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) Dirk Obbink (University of Oxford) Oliver Primavesi (Ludwig-Maximilians Universitat Munchen) Michael D. Reeve (University of Cambridge) Richard J. Tarrant (Harvard University) Formerly out-of-print editions are offered as print-on-demand reprints. Furthermore, all new books in the Bibliotheca Teubneriana series are published as eBooks. The older volumes of the series are being successively digitized and made available as eBooks. If you are interested in ordering an out-of-print edition, which hasn't been yet made available as print-on-demand reprint, please contact us: [email protected] All editions of Latin texts published in the Bibliotheca Teubneriana are collected in the online database BTL Online.

So far, the critical writings of Dionysius of Halicarnassus have mainly attracted interest from historians of ancient linguistics. The Ideology of Classicism proposes a novel approach to Dionysius' oeuvre as a whole by providing the first systematic study of Greek classicism from the perspective of cultural identity. Drawing on cultural anthropology and Social Identity Theory, Wiater explores the world-view bound up with classicist criticism. Only from within this ideological framework can we understand why Greek and Roman intellectuals in Augustan Rome strove to speak and write like Demosthenes, Lysias, and Isocrates. Topics addressed by this study include Dionysius' view of the classical past; mimesis and the aesthetics of reading; language and identity; Dionysius' view of the Romans, their power and the role of Greek culture within it; Greek classicism and the contemporary controversy about Roman identity among Roman intellectuals; the self-image as Greek intellectuals in the Roman empire of Dionysius and his addressees; the dialogic design of Dionysius' essays and how it implements a sense of elitism and distinction; Dionysius' attitudes towards communities competing with him for leadership in rhetorical education and criticism, such as the Peripatetics and Stoics.

Thirty-five years ago Roland Barthes proclaimed the death of the Author. For medievalists no death has been more timely. In medieval French literature there are no Authors, only authors - and enigmas. Is the medieval author a name or a function, an authority or an image? The way we answer questions shapes how we think about names such as Jean de Meun, Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, Christine de Pizan, or lesser-known figures like Gerbert de Montreuil, Gautier de Coincy, Baudoin Butor, or David Aubert. The essays in this volume create a prism through which to understand medieval authorship as a process and the medieval author as an agency in the making. This book will appeal to all those who are interested in theoretical approaches to authorship and could serve as an introduction to medieval French literature for sophisticated readers. For specialists it delivers an assessment of current theoretical and methodological issues in medieval studies.

Bodies and their role in cultural discourse have been a constant focus in the humanities and social sciences in recent years, but comparatively few studies exist about Old Norse-Icelandic or early Irish literature. This study aims to redress this imbalance and presents carefully contextualised close readings of medieval texts. The chapters focus on the role of bodies in mediality discourse in various contexts: that of identity in relation to ideas about self and other, of inscribed and marked skin and of natural bodily matters such as defecation, urination and menstruation. By carefully discussing the sources in their cultural contexts, it becomes apparent that medieval Scandinavian and early Irish texts present their very own ideas about bodies and their role in structuring the narrated worlds of the texts. The study presents one of the first systematic examinations of bodies in these two literary traditions in terms of body criticism and emphasises the ingenuity and complexity of medieval texts.

Reliquaries, elaborate containers housing the remains of the holy dead, informed numerous aspects of medieval culture. Incorporated into religious ceremonies, they contributed to the voiced, world-creating work of performance. At the same time, their decoration often included inscription, silent and self-referential. In the reliquary, silent inscription and spoken performance enshrined one another to produce a visual language about representation. Using texts by Chaucer, along with anonymous plays, lyrics, and hagiographic verse, "The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary" shows how the reliquary's visual language explicated the representational processes of late-medieval English poetry.

Paths of Song: The Lyric Dimension of Greek Tragedy analyzes the multiple and varied evocations of choral lyric in fifth-century Greek tragedy using a variety of methodological approaches that illustrate the myriad forms through which lyric is present and can be presented in tragedy. This collection focuses on different types of interaction of Greek tragedy with lyric poetry in fifth-century Athens: generic, mythological, cultural, musical, and performative. The collected essays demonstrate the dynamic and nuanced relationship between lyric poetry and tragedy within the larger frame of Athenian song- and performance-culture, and reveal a vibrant and symbiotic co-existence between tragedy and lyric. Paths of Song illustrates the effects that this dynamic engagement with lyric possibly had on tragic performances, including performances of satyr drama, as well as on processes of survival and reputation, selection and refiguration, tradition and innovation. The volume is of particular interest to scholars in the field of classics, cultural studies, and the performing arts, as well as to readers interested in poetic transmission and in cultural evolution in antiquity.

"Hybridity, Identity and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain" examines an island made turbulent by conquest and civil war. Focusing upon history writing, ethnography, and saints' lives, this book details how community was imagined in the twelfth century; what role the monsterization of the Welsh, Irish and Jews played in bringing about English unity; and how writers who found the blood of two peoples mixed in their bodies struggled to find a vocabulary to express their identity. Its chapters explores the function and origin of myths like the unity and separateness of the English, the barbarism of the Celtic Fringe, the innate desire of Jews to murder Christian children as part of their Pesach ritual. Populated by wonders like a tempest formed of blood, a Saracen pope, strange creatures suspended between the animal and the human, and corpses animated with uncanny life, "Hybridity, Identity and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain" maps how collective identities form through violent exclusions, and details the price paid by those who find themselves denied the possibility of belonging.

How did Roman poets create character? The mythological figures that dot the landscape of Roman poetry entail their own predetermined plotlines and received characteristics: the idea of a gentle, maternal Medea is as absurd as a spineless and weak Achilles. For Roman poets, the problem is even more acute since they follow on late in a highly developed literary tradition. The fictional characters that populate Roman literature, such as Aeneas and Oedipus, link text and reader in a form of communication that is strikingly different from a first person narrator to an addressee. With Exemplary Traits, Mira Seo addresses this often overlooked question. Her study offers an examination of how Roman poets used models dynamically to create character, and how their referential approach to character reveals them mobilizing the literary tradition. Close readings of Virgil, Lucan, Seneca, and Statius offer a more nuanced discussion of the expectations of both authors and audiences in the Roman world than those currently available in scholarly debate. By tracing the philosophical and rhetorical concepts that underlie the function of characterization, Exemplary Traits allows for a timely reconsideration of it as a fruitful literary technique.

Series Information:
Approaching the Ancient World