This volume in the "York Notes Companions "spans five centuries of post-Conquest literature, written at a time in which enormous social, political and linguistic changes transformed life in Britain.

This volume in the "York Notes Companions "spans five centuries of post-Conquest literature, written at a time in which enormous social, political and linguistic changes transformed life in Britain.

• Part of the first literature study guides to cover key literary periods and texts and combine them with historical and cultural contexts
• Contains essential information on relevant literary criticism
• Dr Carole Maddern is an experienced lecturer who has also written extensively in the field
• Contains various helpful features such as extented commentaries, additional notes, timelines and annotated further reading
  

Plautus, Rome's earliest extant poet, was acclaimed by ancient critics above all for his mastery of language and his felicitous jokes; and yet in modern times relatively little attention has been devoted to elucidating these elements fully. In Funny Words in Plautine Comedy, Michael Fontaine reassesses some of the premises and nature of Plautus' comedies. Mixing textual and literary criticism, Fontaine argues that many of Plautus' jokes and puns were misunderstood already in antiquity, and that with them the names and identities of some familiar characters were misconceived. Central to his study are issues of Plautine language, style, psychology, coherence of characterization, and irony. By examining the comedian's tendency to make up and misuse words, Fontaine sheds new light on the close connection between Greek and Roman comedy. Considerable attention is also paid to Plautus' audience and to the visual elements in his plays. The result is a reappraisal that will challenge many received views of Plautus, positioning him as a poet writing in the Hellenistic tradition for a knowledgeable and sophisticated audience. All quotations from Latin, Greek, and other foreign languages are translated. Extensive indices, including a "pundex," facilitate ease of reference among the many jokes and plays on words discussed in the text.

This detailed literary and rhetorical analysis of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo treats the poem as a unified work of art in which sophisticated poetic craftsmanship is put to the service of serious ethical thought. By means of parallels from Homer, Hesiod, and other Homeric hymns, as well as from later epideictic poetry and prose, the author seeks to show that the poet of the Hymn follows a coherent ''program'' whose intention is to praise Apollo from his birth on humble Delos to his establishment in a position of glory at Delphi. At the same time, the ''Delian'' and ''Pythian'' portions of the hymn are linked by a complex network of ideas bearing on the ethos of Apollo and the nature of his Delphic oracle. The study takes into account previous scholarship on the Hymn and provides appendices on ''The Question of Unity'' and ''The Cosmological Hierarchy and Apollo's Timai''.

Chaucer was a keen observer of the lives of women with a remarkable ability to see beyond his culture's preconceptions concerning their proper roles. The lives of medieval women were divided into three estates--virginity, wifehood, and widowhood--each with complex rules extending to particulars of speech and dress, but all directed toward the single purpose of preserving female chastity, for which a woman was to be prepared to suffer or even die. Margaret Hallissy's lively and literate study traces Chaucer's female characterizations against a background of medieval rules and common assumptions governing women to determine where he adhered to or departed from the behavioral norms. She concludes that he discounted much of these codes of conduct as being detrimental to the development of a full human person. The Wife of Bath, Chaucer's most drastic deviation from the received wisdom about women of his day, could only have been developed by an author/narrator who turned from the prescribed written rules--which, sacred or secular, were all instruments of patriarchal power--to female discourse and action. Applying insights from the works of modern social historians of the Middle Ages and ranging widely in sources from the visual arts, civil and canon law, homiletics, theology, architecture, fashion history, and medicine, Hallissy illuminates the preconceptions with which Chaucer's original audience would have encountered his work and brings her findings to bear on a close analysis of literary characters in the text. The resulting study provides an original and essential dimension for reading Chaucer, while its feminist-historicist approach broadens the audience to those interested in medieval studies and women's studies in general.

Homer, as we have come to know, was an oral poet. He composed two great epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, and performed them without the aid of writing. Each of these tales is the length of a substantial book. How, we wonder, could a poet such as Homer have woven such tales? This book is a study of Homer from a cognitive perspective. The author draws on work in cognitive psychology and linguistics to show how a storyteller who performs before a listening audience works with the resources of memory to produce his tale.

Robert Durling's spirited new prose translation of the Paradiso completes his masterful rendering of the Divine Comedy. Durling's earlier translations of the Inferno and the Purgatorio garnered high praise, and with this superb version of the Paradiso readers can now traverse the entirety of Dante's epic poem of spiritual ascent with the guidance of one of the greatest living Italian-to-English translators.
Reunited with his beloved Beatrice in the Purgatorio, in the Paradiso the poet-narrator journeys with her through the heavenly spheres and comes to know "the state of blessed souls after death." As with the previous volumes, the original Italian and its English translation appear on facing pages. Readers will be drawn to Durling's precise and vivid prose, which captures Dante's extraordinary range of expression--from the high style of divine revelation to colloquial speech, lyrical interludes, and scornful diatribes against corrupt clergy.
This edition boasts several unique features. Durling's introduction explores the chief interpretive issues surrounding the Paradiso, including the nature of its allegories, the status in the poem of Dante's human body, and his relation to the mystical tradition. The notes at the end of each canto provide detailed commentary on historical, theological, and literary allusions, and unravel the obscurity and difficulties of Dante's ambitious style . An unusual feature is the inclusion of the text, translation, and commentary on one of Dante's chief models, the famous cosmological poem by Boethius that ends the third book of his Consolation of Philosophy. A substantial section of Additional Notes discusses myths, symbols, and themes that figure in all three cantiche of Dante's masterpiece. Finally, the volume includes a set of indexes that is unique in American editions, including Proper Names Discussed in the Notes (with thorough subheadings concerning related themes), Passages Cited in the Notes, and Words Discussed in the Notes, as well as an Index of Proper Names in the text and translation. Like the previous volumes, this final volume includes a rich series of illustrations by Robert Turner.

This is the first major critical study of three late plays of Euripides: Helen, Andromeda, and Iphigenia among the Taurians. Matthew Wright offers a sustained reading of the plays, arguing that they are a thematically connected trilogy. He re-examines central themes such as myth, geography, cultural identity, philosophy, religion, and (crucially) genre. These are not separate topics, but are seen as being joined together to form an intricate nexus of ideas. The book has implications for our view of Euripides and the tragic genre as a whole.

This book is centered on the Venetian humanist Pietro Bembo (1470-1547), on his two-year stay in Sicily in 1492-4 to study the ancient Greek language under one of its most distinguished contemporary teachers, the Byzantine emigre Constantine Lascaris, and above all on his ascent of Mount Etna in 1493. The more particular focus of this study is on the imaginative capacities that crucially shape Bembo's elegantly crafted account, in Latin, of his Etna adventure in his so-called De Aetna, published at the Aldine press in Venice in 1496. This work is cast in the form of a dialogue that takes place between the young Bembo and his father Bernardo (himself a prominent Venetian statesman with strong humanist involvements) after Pietro's return to Venice from Sicily in 1494. But De Aetna offers much more than a one-dimensional account of the facts, sights and findings of Pietro's climb. Far more important in the present study is his eye for creative elaboration, or for transforming his literal experience on the mountain into a meditation on his coming-of-age at a remove from the conventional career-path expected of one of his station within the Venetian patriciate. Three mutually informing features that are critical to the artistic originality of De Aetna receive detailed treatment in this study: (i) the stimulus that Pietro drew from the complex history of Mount Etna as treated in the Greco-Roman literary tradition from Pindar onwards; (ii) the striking novelty of De Aetna's status as the first Latin text produced at the nascent Aldine press in the prototype of what modern typography knows as Bembo typeface; and (iii) Pietro's ingenious deployment of Etna as a powerful, multivalent symbol that simultaneously reflects the diverse characterizations of, and the generational differences between, father and son in the course of their dialogical exchanges within De Aetna.

Explores the transformative power of ekphrasis in high and late medieval dream visions and mystical visions. Demonstrates that medieval ekphrases reveal ekphrasis as a process rather than a genre and shows how it works with cultural memory to transform, shift, and revise composition.

This is the first book-length critical study of the three Virgilian works to be published in English for twenty years. It examines in detail the thematic design and intent of the Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid, and documents the development of their political, moral and poetic pessimism. It presents the interrelationship of the three texts, their intertextuality, as integral to their meaning. The book is in three main parts - 'Pastoral Meditation', 'Didactic Paradox', 'Epic Vision' - corresponding to the three Virgilian works. A brief introductory chapter is concerned with questions of method and the problem of Virgil misread. A chief focus of the book is Virgil's preoccupation with the relationship between poetry, art - art's values, perceptions, visions - and the political/historical world, and the changing nature of Virgil's attitude to the socio-moral responsibilities of Rome. The evolution of Vergil's presentation both of Roman imperium and of man's place in nature and history is carefully delineated. With close scrutiny of the language, imagery, structures and design of the three texts and of their verbal and thematic interrelationship, the book offers a substantial reassessment of the major political, psychological and moral ideas of Virgil's poetic oeuvre. An intricate and persuasive picture emerges of Virgil's intellectual and poetic development and a radically new conception of Virgil's image of himself as poet. The provision of translations makes the book accessible to the Latinless reader.

In Speech-in-Character, Diatribe, and Romans 3:1-9, Justin King argues that the rhetorical skill of speech-in-character (prosopopoiia, sermocinatio, conformatio) offers a methodologically sound foundation for understanding the script of Paul's imaginary dialogue with an interlocutor in Romans 3:1-9. King focuses on speech-in-character's stable criterion that attributed speech should be appropriate to the characterization of the speaker. Here, speech-in-character helps to inform which voice in the dialogue speaks which lines, and the general goals of diatribe help shape how an "appropriate" understanding of the script is best interpreted. King's analyses of speech-in-character, diatribe, and Romans, therefore, make independent contributions while simultaneously working together to advance scholarship on a much debated passage in one of history's most important texts.

Gregory Dobrov's Figures of Play explores the reflexive aspects of ancient theatrical culture across genres. Fifth-century tragedy and comedy sublimated the agonistic basis of Greek civilization in a way that invited the community of the polis to confront itself. In the theatre, as in the courts and assemblies, a significant subset of the Athenian public was spectator and judge of contests where important social and ideological issues were played to it by its own members. The "syntax" of drama is shown to involve specific "figures of play" through which the theatrical medium turns back upon itself to study the contexts of its production. Figures of Play is at the forefront of new developments in scholarly approaches to the Greek theatre, bringing the younger methods of literary criticism and performance theory to bear on the study of classics.

This book demonstrates that the Parallel Lives of Plutarch (c. AD 45-120) are far more than simply `sources' for history. A vast retrospective series of biographies of Greek and Roman statesmen, written when Greece was under Roman rule, they aim both to inculcate in the reader the virtues of Greek philosophy and to champion the supremacy of Greek culture against a dominant Rome. As Dr Duff argues, they explore and challenge issues of psychology, education, morality, and cultural identity.

The Carmen de Hastingae Proelio is one of the most discussed sources for the Norman Conquest of England. Its authorship and date cannot be established entirely beyond dispute, but the weight of scholarly opinion supports a date of composition of 1068 or earlier, by Guy, bishop of Amiens, thus making it the earliest surviving account. Whatever its date, the Carmen remains a source of intrinsic interest and importance, and one used by some of the great chroniclers of the period, such as Orderic Vitalis. It is an epic poem, concerned with some of the most momentous events of a remarkable year, in which Halley's comet was a disturbing portent of undisclosed disasters. For this second edition, Frank Barlow has written an entirely new and substantial historical introduction, incorporating the scholarly research of a generation. He has also provided a fresh translation and notes, as well as revising the Latin text of the 1972 edition by Catherine Morton and Hope Muntz.

Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy is an annual publication which includes original articles, which may be of substantial length, on a wide range of topics in ancient philosophy, and review articles of major books. 'an excellent periodical' Mary Margaret MacKenzie, Times Literary Supplement 'This . . . annual collection . . . has become standard reading among specialists in ancient philosophy. . . . Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy continues to reflect the vigour of a challenging but vital sub-discipline within Classical Studies and Philosophy.' Brad Inwood, Bryn Mawr Classical Review [NB: please list contents in catalogues and other publicity material.]

A major work of Latin literature, Tristia 2 is a verse letter addressed by the exiled poet Ovid to the man who banished him from Rome, the emperor Augustus. Ovid apologizes to Augustus for the misdemeanours that led to his banishment, but, more importantly, defends both his life and his poetry in light of the accusation that his earlier Ars amatoria (The Art of Love) had promoted adultery. Jennifer Ingleheart's commentary, the most up-to-date and comprehensive one available, is an invaluable guide to all aspects of the poem - textual, literary, historical, and political - while her Introduction explores, among other topics, its ironical and subversive aspects.

Despite the large number of early Greek inscribed epigrams and their historical and social importance, modern studies have focused either on the literary epigram or (especially after the publication of Hansen's Carmina Epigraphica Graeca) on the inscribed funerary epigram. The dedicatory inscribed epigram, on the other hand, has received little scholarly attention. As a result, neither a comprehensive commentary nor a study of the different features (archaeological, epigraphical, literary and linguistic) of Archaic and Classical inscribed verse dedications has appeared to date. This book aims to fill such a significant void by offering an interdisciplinary commentary on all the early Attic dedicatory epigrams, i.e. those dating from the 7th through the 5th century BCE. Since the message conveyed by an inscribed epigram can be understood only by taking into account three different semantic systems - that of art and archaeology, epigraphy, and that of language and style - at the same time, this commentary will combine a description of the morphology of the monuments on which the epigrams were engraved with an analysis of the alphabets and dialects used in the poems, while making observations on stylistic and literary data.

Old and Middle English literature can be obscure and challenging. So, too, can the vast body of criticism it has elicited. Yet the masters of medieval literature often drew on similar texts, since imitation was admired. For this reason, recent scholarship has often focused on the importance of genre. The genre in which a work was written can illuminate the author's intentions and the text's meaning. Read in light of a genre's parameters, a given work can be considered in relation to other works within the same category. This reference is a comprehensive overview of Old and Middle English literature.

Chapters focus on particular genres, such as Allegorical Verse, Balladry, Beast Fable, Chronicle, Debate Poetry, Epic and Heroic, Lyric, Middle English Parody/Burlesque, Religious and Allegorical Verse, and Romance. Expert contributors define the primary characteristics of each genre and discuss relevant literary works. Chapters provide extensive reviews of scholarship and close with detailed bibliographies. A more thorough bibliography of major scholarly studies closes the book.

A unique variety of approaches to all aspects of urban culture in the ancient world can be found in Urban Dreams and Realities in Antiquity, a collection of 19 essays addressing ancient cities from an interdisciplinary perspective. As the title indicates, the volume considers both how ancient people lived in their cities as physical structures and how they thought with them as ideas and symbols. Essays in this volume deal with texts and sites from Spain to South India, but there is a particular focus on the archaeology and epigraphy of Roman-era Italy, civic identity in the Roman provinces, the Hebrew Bible and Early Christian literature, Vergil and other imperial Latin authors.

Emily Francomano explores how medieval & early modern writers reconstructed, & also how readers read, the contradictory meanings of 'Lady' Wisdom.