Reads the imagined history of the long term relationship between pagan and Christian through quasi-factual fifteenth-century Middle English writings, from Lydgate's Troy Book to the hagiographies of Bokenham, Barclay and Capgrave and Mandeville's Travels. SHORTLISTED for the 2020 Katharine Briggs Award. Late medieval English culture was fascinated by the figure of the pagan, the ancestor whose religious difference must be negotiated, and by the pagan's idol, an animate artefact. In romances, histories and hagiographies medieval Christians told the story of the pagans, focussing on the absence or presence of pagan material culture in the medieval world to ask whether the pagan era had completely ended or whether it might persist into the Christian present. This book reads the imagined history of the long term relationship between pagan and Christian through quasi-factual fifteenth-century Middle English writings. John Lydgate's Troy Book describes the foundation of a Troy that is at once London's ancestor and a vision for its future; he, John Capgrave and Reginald Pecock consider how pagans were able to build idols that attracted spirits to inhabit them. The hagiographies of Osbern Bokenham, Alexander Barclay, Capgrave and Lydgate describe the confrontation of saint and idol, and the saint's appropriation for Christians of the city the pagans built. Traces of the pagan appeared in the medieval present: Capgrave, Lydgateand John Metham contemplated both extant and lost artefacts; Lollards and orthodox writers disputed whether Christian devotional practice had pagan aspects; and Mandeville's Travels sympathetically imagined how pagans mightexplain themselves. Dr SARAH SALIH is Senior Lecturer in Medieval English, King's College London.

This book comprises essays on the nature of Aspasius' commentary, his interpretation of Aristotle, and his own place in the history of thought. The contributions are in English or Italian. Aspasius' commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics is the earliest ancient commentary on Aristotle of which extensive parts survive in their original form. It is important both for the history of commentary as a genre and for the history of philosophical thought in the first two centuries A.D.; it is also still valuable as what its author intended it to be, an aid in interpreting the Ethics. All three aspects are explored by the essays. The book is not formally a commentary on Aspasius' commentary; but between them the essays consider the interpretation of numerous problematic or significant passages. Full indices will enable readers quickly to locate discussion of particular parts of Aspasius' work. This volume of essays will form a natural complement to the first ever translation of Aspasius' commentary into any modern language, currently in preparation by Paul Mercken.

The chastity belt is one of those objects people have commonly identified with the "dark" Middle Ages. This book analyzes the origin of this myth and demonstrates how a convenient misconception, or rather contorted imagination, of an allegedly historical practice has led to profoundly erroneous interpretations of alleged control mechanisms used by jealous husbands in the Middle Ages.

This fascinating volume examines the enduring influence of courtly tradition and courtly love, particularly in contemporary popular culture. The ten chapters explore topics including the impact of the medieval troubadour in modern love songs, the legacy of figures such as Tristan, Iseult, Lancelot, Guinevere, and Merlin in modern film and literature, and more generally, how courtly and chivalric conceptions of love have shaped the Western world's conception of love, loyalty, honor, and adultery throughout history and to this day.

Prepared in light of recent discoveries in the field, this is the first volume of a modern, four-volume edition of the Greek lyric fragments. The book presents fragments from Alcman, Stesichorus, and Ibycus, along with a preface, a brief exegetical commentary, and ancient testimonia relating to the poets' art and life. All of the text is in Latin or Greek.

The Daughter Zion allegory represents a particular narrative articulation of the paradigm of bridal mysticism deriving from the Song of Songs, the core element of which is the quest of Daughter Zion for a worthy object of love. Examining medieval German religious writing (verse and prose) and Dutch prose works, Annette Volfing shows that this storyline provides an excellent springboard for investigating key aspects of medieval religious and literary culture. In particular, she argues, the allegory lends itself to an exploration of the medieval sense of self; of the scope of human agency within the mystical encounter; of the gendering of the religious subject; of conceptions of space and enclosure; and of fantasies of violence and aggression. Volfing suggests that Daughter Zion adaptations increasingly tended to empower the religious subject to seek a more immediate relationship with the divine and to embrace a wider range of emotions: the mediating personifications are gradually eliminated in favour of a model of religious experience in which the human subject engages directly with Christ. Overall, the development of the allegory from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries marks the striving towards a greater sense of equality and affective reciprocity with the divine, within the context of an erotic union.

In The Sappho History, Margaret Reynolds traces the story of the reception of Sappho's poetry and her afterlife in literature and art from the mid 18th century to the present day. For women writers in the Romantic period, she symbolized possibility; for the young Tennyson, she was a private ancestor helping him make his own name as a poet. Richly illustrated throughout, The Sappho History provides a new view of Western culture from the Romantic period to the Modern.

This book presents a theoretical and historicized reading of the production of the 'autonomous' subject in Milton's prose and in Paradise Lost. It rejects the current orthodoxy that liberal humanism is just a form of domination, and reads Milton's texts as revolutionary. Although Milton participates in the formation of discourses of sexuality, labour and the nature of reason which come to be normative, neither Milton's texts nor modernity more generally can be understood without also accepting the dynamism inherent in the belief in individual freedom.

Interpretation of ancient Greek literature is often enough distorted by the preconceptions of modern times, especially on ancient morality. This is often equivalent to begging the question. If we think e.g. of arete, which has different meanings in different contexts, we shall think in English (or in Modern Greek or in French or in German) and shall falsify the phenomena. If we are to understand the Greek concept e.g. of arete we must study the nature of the situations in which it is applied. For it is an important fact in the study of Greek society that the Greeks used the one word (e.g. arete) where we use different words. If we are to understand properly the texts, we have to view them in their historical and social context. Ancient Greek thought needs to be studied together with politics, ethics, and economic behaviour. Moreover, the best insights can be found in those who confine themselves to the terms of each ancient author's analysis. From this principle each of the contributions of the volume begins.

The period covered by Sallust's Histories - 78-67 BC - forms part of the less well-documented eras of the late Republic. Sallust's contribution, despite its fragmentary transmission (about five hundred fragments of narrative, four speeches, and two letters preserved intact), remains of major importance to ancient historians. For nearly a century, scholars have consulted the edition of B. Maurenbrecher (1891-3) - a work, for its time, of considerable merit. Continuing research on the period has produced material with a bearing on the interpretation of the text; in addition, several fragments not known to Maurenbrecher have subsequently been discovered. For this new translation, Dr McGushin has freshly revised Maurenbrecher's placement and ordering of the fragments, and incorporated this newly discovered material. Together with a comprehensive introduction, he also provides a detailed interpretation in the first ever full-length commentary on the work.

First published in 1964, this volume remains the standard introduction to Pindar.

This volume, in focusing on the meaning and treatment of symbol and myth as developed in some of the more familiar Greek and Roman poets, aims "to open up what may be a new avenue into the ancient poetic imagination."

Apuleius' tale of Cupid and Psyche has been popular since it was first written in the second century CE as part of his Latin novel Metamorphoses. Often treated as a standalone text, Cupid and Psyche has given rise to treatments in the last 400 years as diverse as plays, masques, operas, poems, paintings and novels, with a range of diverse approaches to the text. Apuleius' story of the love between the mortal princess Psyche (or "Soul") and the god of Love has fascinated recipients as varied as Romantic poets, psychoanalysts, children's books authors, neo-Platonist philosophers and Disney film producers. These readers themselves produced their own responses to and versions of the story. This volume is the first broad consideration of the reception of C&P in Europe since 1600 and an adventurous interdisciplinary undertaking. It is the first study to focus primarily on material in English, though it also ranges widely across literary genres in Italian, French and German, encompassing poetry, drama and opera as well as prose fiction and art history, studied by an international team of established and young scholars. Detailed studies of single works and of whole genres make this book relevant for students of Classics, English, Art History, opera and modern film.

The origins of present-day Ibero-American racialization can be traced to the period when Europe straddled the boundary between the Middle Ages and the era of New World exploration. Focusing on themes of race, caste, and indigeneity in travel narratives, Harney explores this already internationalized world of late-medieval and early-modern Europe.

Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Feminist Origins of the Arthurian Legend provides the first feminist analysis of both the Arthurian section of The History of the Kings of Britain and The Life of Merlin. Fiona Tolhurst argues that because Geoffrey creates nontraditional and unusually powerful female figures, he stands outside of - and works against the misogyny of - the medieval literary tradition. This study employs the strategies of both historicist and New Historicist critics and adds a new dimension to existing scholarship by proposing that the word 'feminist' can be used to describe a medieval text that presents female figures meaningfully and, in most cases, positively.

Exploring the diverse factors that persuaded Christopher Columbus that he could reach the fabled "East" by sailing west, Dante, Columbus and the Prophetic Tradition considers, first, the impact of Dante's Divine Comedy and the apocalyptic prophetic tradition that it reflects, on Columbus's perception both of the cosmos and the eschatological meaning of his journey to what he called an 'other world.' In so doing, the book considers how affinities between himself and the exiled poet might have led Columbus to see himself as a divinely appointed agent of the apocalypse and his enterprise as the realization of the spiritual journey chronicled in the Comedy. As part of this study, the book necessarily examines the cultural space that Dante's poem, its geography, cosmography and eschatology, enjoyed in late fifteenth century Spain as well as Columbus's own exposure to it. As it considers how Italian writers and artists of the late Renaissance and Counter Reformation received the news of Columbus' 'discovery' and appropriated the figure of Dante and the pseudo-prophecy of the Comedy to interpret its significance, the book examines how Tasso, Ariosto, Stradano and Stigliani, in particular, forge a link between Dante and Columbus to present the latter as an inheritor of an apostolic tradition that traces back to the Aeneid. It further highlights the extent to which Italian writers working in the context of the Counter Reformation, use a Dantean filter to propagate the notion of Columbus as a new Paul, that is, a divinely appointed apostle to the New World, and the Roman Church as the rightful emperor of the souls encountered there.

The categories of classical narratology have been successfully applied to ancient texts in the last two decades, but in the meantime narratological theory has moved on. In accordance with these developments, Narratology and Interpretation draws out the subtler possibilities of narratological analysis for the interpretation of ancient texts. The contributions explore the heuristic fruitfulness of various narratological categories and show that, in combination with other approaches such as studies in deixis, performance studies and reader-response theory, narratology can help to elucidate the content of narrative form. Besides exploring new theoretical avenues and offering exemplary readings of ancient epic, lyric, tragedy and historiography, the volume also investigates ancient predecessors of narratology.

The essays compiled in this volume individually address the varied forms in which the revival of Platonism manifested itself in ancient philosophy. It pays special attention to the issues of unity and beauty, the mind and knowledge, the soul and the body, virtue and happiness, and additionally considers the political and religious dimensions of Platonic thought. Starting from Plato and Aristotle, the studies examine the multiple transformational forms of Platonism, including the Neo-Platonists - Plotinus, Porphyrios, Iamblichus, Themistius, Proclus, and Marinus - along with Christian thinkers such as St. Augustine, Boethius, and Dionysus the Areopagite. The authors who have contributed to this volume make multiple references to the scholarly work of Dominic J. O'Meara. Their further refinement of O'Meara's approach particularly casts a new light on Late-Platonic ethics. The essays in this collection also contribute to scholarly research about the multiple inter-relationships among the Platonists themselves and between Platonists and philosophers from other schools. Taken as a whole, this book reveals the full breadth of potential in the revival and transformation of ancient Platonism.

Old Norse texts offer many different ideas about what it is to be female, presenting women who occupy diverse social and economic positions or who have varying racial origins. Covering a much wider range of texts than have previous studies, this book presents a comprehensive and ground-breaking analysis of women in Old Norse literature. Raising new, probing questions, generated by theoretical insights from comparative studies, and from feminist, queer, monster and speech act theory, Johanna Katrin Frioriksdottir explores the many ways in which medieval Icelandic sagas construct the relationship between women and power. Illuminating the preoccupations, desires, and anxieties of the sagas' authors and audiences, this book offers excitingly fresh perspectives on how Icelandic prose genres mediate medieval attitudes to women, power, social organization, and ideal human behavior.

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.

Medieval writers such as Chaucer, Abelard, and Langland often overlaid personal story and sacred history to produce a distinct narrative form. The first of its kind, this study traces this widely used narrative tradition to Augustine's two great histories: Confessions and City of God .

Juan Ruiz's "Libro de Buen Amor" (1330/1343) is a lively and challenging medieval classic that ranks alongside the works of Dante and Chaucer. This volume is the first to systematically approach the role of humor in the "Libro de Buen Amor "through the treatment of the body, the visual, and the representation of first-person protagonist as lover. Haywood examines the place of the bawdy and the grotesque in the "Libro de Buen Amor" in relation to secular and sacred culture. This innovative study will be of interest to scholars and students interested in humor, cultural domains, medieval studies, and Spanish studies.

One of the most widely read and studied texts produced in Late Antiquity is the prison diary of a young woman who was martyred in the year 202 or 203 C.E. in Carthage, as part of a civic celebration. Her name was Perpetua, and, despite her honorable marriage and her baby son, she refused to recant her faith after she was arrested with a group of Christians. Imprisoned with her was a slave girl called Felicitas, who was in an advanced state of pregnancy. Felicitas gave birth just before she entered the arena, where the two women were mauled by wild animals and died with their fellow inmates. A description of their heroic deaths is appended to the diary by an editor, who tells us that, as they died, Perpetua and Felicitas arranged each other's clothes modestly and finally bid farewell in this life with the kiss of peace. This remarkable document survives in one Greek manuscript and nine Latin versions. Perpetua's story is read in numerous courses and, thanks to the Frontline (PBS) special "From Jesus to Christ," it has found a growing popular audience. Thomas Heffernan's new edition of this extraordinary work contains much that has never been done before, including a new English translation and the first detailed historical commentary in English on the entire narrative of the Passion. It also includes newly edited versions of the Latin manuscripts and - rarer still - a version of the Greek manuscript. He concludes the book with a description of all of the known manuscripts and thorough scholarly indices of the text itself.

The distinctions and similarities among Roman, Jewish, and Christian burials can provide evidence of social networks, family life, and, perhaps, religious sensibilities. Is the Roman development from columbaria to catacombs the result of evolving religious identities or simply a matter of a change in burial fashions? Do the material remains from Jewish burials evidence an adherence to ancient customs, or the adaptation of rituals from surrounding cultures? What Greco-Roman funerary images were taken over and "baptized" as Christian ones? The answers to these and other questions require that the material culture be viewed, whenever possible, in situ, through multiple disciplinary lenses and in light of ancient texts. Roman historians (John Bodel, Richard Saller, Andrew Wallace-Hadrill), archaeologists (Susan Stevens, Amy Hirschfeld), scholars of rabbinic period Judaism (Deborah Green), Christian history (Robin M. Jensen), and the New Testament (David Balch, Laurie Brink, O.P., Margaret M. Mitchell, Carolyn Osiek, R.S.C.J.) engaged in a research trip to Rome and Tunisia to investigate imperial period burials first hand. Commemorting the Dead is the result of a three year scholarly conversation on their findings.