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.

This collective volume provides a fresh perspective on Homeric reception through a methodologically focused, interdisciplinary investigation of the transformations of Homeric epic within varying generic and cultural contexts. It explores how various aspects of Homeric poetics appeal and can be mapped on to a diversity of contexts under different socio-historical, intellectual, literary and artistic conditions. The volume brings together internationally acclaimed scholars and acute young researchers in the fields of classics and reception studies, yielding insight into the varied strategies and ideological forces that define Homeric reception in literature, scholarship and the performing arts (theatre, film and music) and shape the 'horizon of expectations' of readers and audience. This collection also showcases that the wide-ranging 'migration' of Homeric material through time and across place holds significant cultural power, being instrumental in the construction of new cultural identities. The volume is of particular interest to scholars in the fields of classics, reception and cultural studies and the performing arts, as well as to readers fascinated by ancient literature and its cultural transformations.

The foundation of this book is a line-by-line analysis of enjambement, or the syntactical relationship between successive verses, in the Iliad. Such a study develops naturally from Milman Parry's work, which sought to show the importance for oral composition, and specifically for Homer, both of the syntactical link between lines and the frequency of each type of enjambement. In contrast to earlier studies, which utilized only portions of the text, Dr. Higbie's book is unique in presenting analyses of the complete poem. In doing so, she makes material available which can be used to answer larger stylistic questions of genre, effect, and the manipulation and enjambing of formulae. Speeches, similes, battle scenes, and catalogues, for example, can be distinguished by the length and structure of the sentences, as well as by the relationship between the individual sentence and the hexameter verse. Moreover, the flexibility and survival of the formula depend in part upon its grammatical construction. The importance of enjambement to Homeric verse makes this book an essential reference work for scholars and students of Homer alike.

England the Nation is the first book to pay detailed attention to the earlier fourteenth century in England as a literary period in its own right. Thorlac Turville-Petre surveys the wide range of writings by the generation before Chaucer, and explores how English writers in the half-century leading up to the outbreak of the Hundred Years War expressed their concepts of England as a nation, and how they exploited the association between nation, people, and language. At the centre of Turville-Petre's work is a study of the construction of national identity that takes place in the histories written in English. The contribution of romances and saints' lives to an awareness of the nation's past are also considered, as in the questions of how writers were able to reconcile their sense of regional identity with commitment to the nation. A final chapter explores the interrelationship between England's three languages - Latin, French, and English - at a time when English was attaining the status of the national language, Middle English quotations are glossed or translated into modern English throughout. England the Nation takes the current debate on nationalism into a new area, and will be of interest to anyone studying medieval English literature and history, as well as the development of nationalism, and the rise of English as a national language.

New Medieval Literatures Volume 7 spotlights methodologies and practices in medieval textual studies. Ten challenging new essays together explore contemporary medievalist practices in and beyond the academy; review and critique disciplinary cultures in medieval studies past and present; and experiment with new paradigms. As usual, the volume showcases work by leading scholars together with work by striking new voices. In this volume's analytical survey 'Actually existing Anglo-Saxon Studies', Clare Lees imagines alternatives to current disciplinary culture. Other essays are Wendy Scase, 'The Medievalist's Tale' (introduction); Stephanie Trigg, 'Walking through Cathedrals: Scholars, Pilgrims, and Medieval Tourists'; Steve Ellis, 'Framing the Father: Chaucer and Virginia Woolf'; Daniel Wakelin, 'William Worcester writes a History of his Reading'; Mishtooni Bose, 'Vernacular Philosophy and the Making of Orthodoxy in the Fifteenth Century'; Melissa Raine, '"Fals Flesch": Food and the Embodied Piety of Margery Kempe'; Lisa H. Cooper, 'Urban Utterances: Merchants, Artisans, and the Alphabet in Caxton's Dialogues in French and English'; Seeta Chaganti, '"A Form as Grecian Goldsmiths make": Enshrining Narrative in Chretien de Troyes's Cliges and the Stavelot Triptych'; and Christopher Cannon, 'Between the Old and the Middle of English'.

New Medieval Literatures is a new annual of work on the textual cultures of medieval Europe and beyond. The focus of Volume 2 is on continental European literatures as well as Anglo-Norman and Anglo-Latin writings, in addition to exemplification of work on earlier periods. The essays in Volume 2 move from the streets of Paris, London, and English market towns to English monasteries, idealized pastoral spaces, Christian-Jewish-Muslim Spain, Rome, and fourteenth-century Oxford. The essays cohere around three important issues of cultural analysis: gender, space, and reading history.

The Virgilian centos anticipate the avant-garde and smash the image of a staid, sober, and centered classical world. This book examines the twelve mythological and secular Virgilian centos that survive from antiquity. The centos, in which authors take non-consecutive lines or segments of lines from the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid and reconnect them to produce new poems, have received limited attention. No other book-length study exists of all the centos, which date from ca. 200 to ca. 530.
The centos are literary games, and they have a playful shock value that feels very modern. Yet the texts also demand to be taken seriously for what they disclose about late antique literary culture, Virgil's reception, and several important topics in Latin literature and literary studies generally. As radically intertextual works, the centos are particularly valuable sites for pursuing inquiry into allusion. Scrutinizing the peculiarities of the texts' allusive engagements with Virgil requires clarification of the roles of the author and the reader in allusion, the criteria for determining what constitutes an allusion, and the different functions allusion can have. By investigating the centos from these different perspectives and asking what they reveal about a wide range of weighty subjects, this book comes into dialogue with major topics and studies in Latin literature.

In 'The Letters of Alciphron: A Unified Literary Work?', Michele Biraud and Arnaud Zucker have gathered a dozen international contributions about the collection of letters of Alciphron, hitherto mainly studied as part of the epistolary genre at the time of the Second Sophistic or as testimony of a nostalgia for the Athens of Menander's time. The aim is to show the unity of a literary project through studies on the careful arrangement of each book (overall organization, coherent reappropriation of a culture, innovations in generic hybridization) and various elements of cohesion between the four books. For this purpose, were used as tools codicological criticism, stylistic and rhetorical examination, analysis of prosody, study of thematic treatments, uses of onomastics.

This is the first study in English to examine across the range of Greek literature one of the most crucial terms in Greek ethical and social discourse, aidos. Commonly rendered `shame', `modesty', or `respect', aidos is also notoriously one of the most elusive and difficult Greek words to translate. In this book Dr Cairns discusses the nature and application of aidos and other relevant terms in a number of authors, with particular emphasis on their manifestations in epic, tragedy, and philosophy. He shows that the essence of the concept is to be found in its relationship with Greek values of honour, in which context it can recognize and respond to the honour of both the self and others. It thus involves both self- and other- regarding behaviour, competitive and co-operative values. Despite this crucial relationship with systems of honour, however, the possession of aidos at no stage rules out the sort of commitment to internalized standards or ideals which we might associate with conscience.

The present volume offers the first critical edition, accompanied by an English translation, a commentary, and an introductory study, of Liber nativitatum (Book of Nativities) and Liber Abraham Iudei de nativitatibus (Book on Nativities by Abraham the Jew), two astrological treatises in Latin that were written by Abraham Ibn Ezra or attributed to him, and whose Hebrew source-text or archetype has not survived.

A study of the prophetic tradition in medieval England brings out its influence on contemporary politics and the contemporary elite. The period from the twelfth century to the Wars of the Roses witnessed a dominant tradition of secular prophecy engaged with high political affairs, which this book charts, discussing the production of prophetic texts forecastingthe rule of the whole of Britain by the kings of England. It draws on the prophetic works of familiar authors and names, such as Geoffrey of Monmouth and Thomas of Erceldoune, alongside previously unpublished manuscript material,to study identity formation among medieval political elites. Alongside English prophetic texts, the author explores competing visions of the British future produced in Wales and Scotland, with which English prophetic authors entered into an overt dialogue; this was a cross-border exchange which in many ways shaped the development of this deeply influential discourse. Prophecy is revealed to be a dynamic arena for literary exchange, where alternative imaginings of the future sovereignty of Britain vied for acceptance, and compelled decision making at the highest political levels. Dr Victoria Flood is Lecturer in Medieval and Early Modern Literature at the University of Birmingham.

While modern students of Greek religion are alert to the occasion-boundedness of epiphanies and divinatory dreams in Greek polytheism, they are curiously indifferent to the generic parameters of the relevant textual representations on which they build their argument. Instead, generic questions are normally left to the literary critic, who in turn is less interested in religion. To evaluate the relation of epiphanies and divinatory dreams to Greek polytheism, the book investigates relevant representations through all major textual genres in pagan antiquity. The evidence of the investigated genres suggests that the 'epiphany-mindedness' of the Greeks, postulated by most modern critics, is largely an academic chimaera, a late-comer of Christianizing 19th-century-scholarship. It is primarily founded on a misinterpretation of Homer's notorious anthropomorphism (in the Iliad and Odyssey but also in the Homeric Hymns). This anthropomorphism, which is keenly absorbed by Greek drama and figural art, has very little to do with the religious lifeworld experience of the ancient Greeks, as it appears in other genres. By contrast, throughout all textual genres investigated here, divinatory dreams are represented as an ordinary and real part of the ancient Greeks' lifeworld experience.

Written by Derrida scholars, philosophers, and classicists, Derrida and Antiquity analyses a dialogue with the ancient world in the work of one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century. Through an analysis of Derrida's work it explores the relationship between modern philosophy and Plato, the role ancient concepts of democracy have played in modern political debates, and the place of antiquity in contemporary discussions about Europe, as well as investigating the influence that deconstruction has had on the study of classical literature, ancient philosophy, and early religion. The volume is prefaced by a previously untranslated essay by Derrida, 'We Other Greeks'.

Speakers address audiences in the earliest Greek literature, but oratory became a distinct genre in the late fifth century and reached its maturity in the fourth. This book traces the development of its techniques by examining the contribution made by each orator. Dr Usher makes the speeches come alive for the reader through an in-depth analysis of the problems of composition and the likely responses of contemporary audiences. His study differs from previous books in its recognition of the richness of the early tradition which made innovation difficult, however, the orators are revealed as men of remarkable talent, versatility, and resource. Antiphon's pioneering role, Lysias' achievement of balance between the parts of the speech, the establishment of oratory as a medium of political thought by Demosthenes and Isocrates, and the individual characteristics of other orators - Andocides, Isaeus, Lycurgus, Hyperides, Dinarchus and Apollodorus - together make a fascinating study in evolution; while the illustrative texts of the orators (which are translated into English) include some of the liveliest and most moving passages in Greek literature.

In the last decades the field of research on ancient Greek scholarship has been the object of a remarkable surge of interest, with the publication of handbooks, reference works, and new editions of texts. This partly unexpected revival is very promising and it continues to enhance and modify both our knowledge of ancient scholarship and the way in which we are accustomed to discuss these texts and tackle the editorial and exegetical challenges they pose. This volume deals with some pivotal aspects of this topic, being the outcome of a three-year project funded by the Italian Ministry for Education, University and Research (MIUR) on specific aspects of the critical re-appraisal of Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, and Aeschylus in Greek culture throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages. It tackles issues such as the material form of the transmission of the exegesis from papyri to codices, the examination of hitherto unexplored branches of the manuscript evidence, the discussion of some important scholia, and the role played by the indirect tradition and the assimilation of the exegetical heritage in grammatical and lexicographical works. Some strands of the ancient and medieval scholarship are here re-evaluated afresh by adopting an interdisciplinary methodology which blends modern editorial techniques developed for 'problematic' or 'non-authorial' medieval texts with current trends in the history of philology and literary criticism. In their diversity of subject matter and approach the papers collected in the volume give intended readers an excellent overview of the topics of the project.

This is a study of an anonymous ancient work, originally composed in Greek, titled Joseph and Aseneth. Although relatively unknown outside of scholarly circles, the story is remarkable because of its focus on a female character and its absence of overt misogyny. It has traditionally been viewed as an early 2nd-century C.E. conversion story of Jewish provenance. Kraemer, through her detailed examination of the texts, arrives at conclusions that disagree with previous findings with respect not only to questions of date, provenance, identity, geographic origin and textual relationships, but also to many matters of interpretation.

Hellenistic poets opted and were very likely expected to deal meaningfully, and perhaps competitively, with the tradition they inherited. They also needed to secure the goodwill of actual or potential patrons. Apollonius, the author of a novel heroic epic, eschews references to literary polemics and patronage. Callimachus often adopts a polemical stance against some colleagues in order to suggest his poetic excellence. Theocritus chooses a third way, which has not been investigated adequately. He avoids antagonism but ironizes the theme of poetic excellence and distances himself from the tradition of competitive success. He does not cast his narrators as superior to predecessors and contemporaries but stresses the advantages and merits of colleagues. This rejection of conceit is connected with a major strand in Theocritean poetry: the power of word, including song, to provide assistance to characters in distress is a major open issue. Language is versatile and potent but not all-powerful. Song gives pleasure but is not a panacea while instruction and advice are never helpful and may even prove harmful. Most genuine pieces are ambiguous and open-ended so that the aspirations of characters are not presented as doomed to failure.

This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. The Medicamina Faciei Femineae is a didactic elegy which showcases an early example of Ovid's trademark combination of a moralistic, instructive form and trivial subject and meter. Exploring female beauty and cosmetics, with particular emphasis on the concept of 'cultus', the poem also presents five practical recipes for cosmetic treatments used by Roman women. Covering both didactic parody and pharmacological reality, this deceptively complex poem possesses wit, vivacity and importance. The first full study devoted to this little-researched but multi-faceted poem, Ovid on Cosmetics includes an in-depth introduction which situates the poem within its literary heritage of didactic and elegiac poetry, its place in Ovid's oeuvre and its relevance to social values, personal aesthetics and attitudes to female beauty in Roman society. The Latin text is presented on parallel pages alongside a new literal and quality translation, and all Latin phrases are translated for the non-specialist reader. Detailed commentary notes elucidate the text and individual phrases still further.The volume also contains related passages with translations and commentaries from Ovid's Ars Amatoria 3.101-250, on dress, appearance and make-up, and Amores 1.114, on hair dye and resulting baldness.Ovid on Cosmetics presents and explicates this witty, subversive yet significant poem, as well as contextualises its importance for gender and sexuality studies, women's life in antiquity, eroticism, aesthetics and social attitudes to women and beauty in Ancient Rome.

When we encounter a text, whether ancient or modern, we typically start at the beginning and work our way toward the end. In Tracking the Master Scribe, Sara J. Milstein demonstrates that for biblical and Mesopotamian literature, this habit can yield misleading results. In the ancient Near East, "master scribes"-those who had the authority to produce and revise literature-regularly modified their texts in the course of transmission. One of the most effective techniques for change was to add something to the front-what Milstein calls "revision through introduction." This method allowed scribes to preserve their received material while simultaneously recasting it. As a result, numerous biblical and Mesopotamian texts manifest multiple and even competing viewpoints. Due to the primary position of these additions, such reworked texts are often read solely through the lens of their final contributions. This is true not only for biblical and cuneiform texts in their final forms, but also for Mesopotamian texts that are known from multiple versions: first impressions carry weight. Rather than "nail down every piece of the puzzle," Tracking the Master Scribe demonstrates what is to be gained when engaging questions of textual transmission with attention to how scribes actually worked. Working from the two earliest corpora that allow us to track large-scale change, the book provides broad overviews of evidence available for revision through introduction, as well as a set of detailed case studies that offer fresh insight into well-known biblical and Mesopotamian literary texts. The result is the first comprehensive and comparative profile of this key scribal method: one that was not only ubiquitous in the ancient Near East but also epitomizes the attitudes of the master scribes toward the literature that they produced.

Six hundred years after Poggio's retrieval of the De rerum natura, and with the recent surge of interest in Lucretius and his influence, there has never been a better time to fully assess and recognize the shaping force of his thought and poetry over European culture from antiquity to modern times. This volume offers a multidisciplinary and updated overview of Lucretius as philosopher and as poet, with special attention to how these two aspects interact. The volume includes 18 contributions by established as well as early career scholars working on Lucretius' philosophical and poetic work, and his reception both in ancient and early modern times. All the chapters present new and original research. Section I explores core issues of Epicurean-Lucretian epistemology and ethics. Section II expounds much new material on ancient response to and reception of Lucretius. Section III presents new material and analysis on the immediate, fraught early modern reception of the poem. Section IV offers a wide collection of new and original papers on Lucretius' fortunes in the period from Machiavelli up to Victorian times. Section V explores little known aspects of the iconographical and biographical motifs related to the De rerum natura.

"Dunhuang Manuscript Culture" explores the world of Chinese manuscripts from ninth-tenth century Dunhuang, an oasis city along the network of pre-modern routes known today collectively as the Silk Roads. The manuscripts have been discovered in 1900 in a sealed-off side-chamber of a Buddhist cave temple, where they had lain undisturbed for for almost nine hundred years. The discovery comprised tens of thousands of texts, written in over twenty different languages and scripts, including Chinese, Tibetan, Old Uighur, Khotanese, Sogdian and Sanskrit. This study centres around four groups of manuscripts from the mid-ninth to the late tenth centuries, a period when the region was an independent kingdom ruled by local families. The central argument is that the manuscripts attest to the unique cultural diversity of the region during this period, exhibiting-alongside obvious Chinese elements-the heavy influence of Central Asian cultures. As a result, it was much less 'Chinese' than commonly portrayed in modern scholarship. The book makes a contribution to the study of cultural and linguistic interaction along the Silk Roads.

This is the first general study of the fortunes of Catullus in the Renaissance. After a brief introduction tracing the transmission of the poet from antiquity to the middle of the fifteenth century, the author follows his reception and interpretation by editors, commentators, university lecturers, and poets from the first edition (1472) through the sixteenth century. Their text and interpretations not only influenced the ways in which later generations (including our own) would read the poet, but also provide windows into their own intellectual and historical worlds, which include Poliziano's Florence, Rome under the Medici Pope Leo X and his puritanical successor Adrian VI, the Paris of Ronsard and Marc-Antoine de Muret, post-Tridentine Rome, sixteenth-century Leiden, fifteenth-century Verona, where Catullus was an object of patriotic veneration, and Pontano's Naples, where poets learned to read and imitate him through Martial's imitations.