Simplicius and Priscian were two of the seven Neoplatonists who left Athens when the Christian Emperor Justinian closed the pagan school there in AD 529. Their commentaries on works on sense perception, one by Aristotle and one by his successor Theophrastus, are translated here in one volume. Both commentaries give a highly Neoplatonized reading to their Aristotelian subjects and give an insight into late Neoplatonist psychology.

Unruly women constantly speak out in lyric poetry, their voices brought to life in the bodies of female singers, dancers, and instrumentalists. Performing Women is the first book-length study of female performers in Galician-Portuguese and Castilian comic-satiric poetry. Filios reconstructs medieval women's oral performances by bringing modern ethnographic work and performance theory to bear on literary and historical evidence. Filios explores how women's performances (and men's impersonations of women) contributed to the construction of the court, the marketplace, and the countryside as cultural spaces defined by certain acts, discourses, and conflicts. She argues that poetic portraits of sexually aggressive courtesans, bread sellers, and mountain women allowed elite men to portray their own sexuality as transgressive and to adopt temporarily a female identity, enabling them to speak and act as a degraded other. While these portraits may be misogynistic, they also demonstrate that poets appreciated marginalized women's characters, placing speeches overtly critical of dominant power structures in their mouths and constructing imaginary communities around them. Men wrote these characters, women appropriated them, ironically performing as themselves. By situating medieval lyric poems in their dialogic performance context, this study demonstrates the centrality female performers in poetic spectacles.

This volume proposes a multidisciplinary approach to the history of Ancient Greek. Each of its ten papers offers a methodological example of how the study of Greek can be greatly enhanced by a truly multidisciplinary perspective in which the analysis of language interacts with epigraphy, textual philology and comparative linguistics, yet without neglecting the role that linguistic features play in the texts in which they are used, and hence in the culture which produced both. The first four papers tackle epic language, addressing eccentric pronouns and formulas, the role and semantics of the middle perfect, and the development of hexameter poetry in the colonial West. The next two papers are devoted to lyric poetry and its linguistic influence in Greek literature and tackle fragments by Corinna and Epicharmus respectively. The remaining four contributions look into a variety of topics spanning from early Ionic prose to the diachronic development of the Greek lexicon and its reception in Byzantine lexicography. They all provide examples of how Greek literary language evolved across the centuries, how it was perceived by ancient scholars, and what contribution modern linguistic approaches can provide to our understanding of both these issues.

Focusing on issues of interpretation, this book collects and translates a number of medieval mi'raj accounts. The narratives of Muhammad's heavenly journey offer a prism through which to view the medieval elite's communal, political and theological motives. These accounts reveal the historiographic process in which a single event becomes a focal point for those struggling to define the past and establish a communal, confessional and political identity by reporting the apparant facts about a particular moment in time. In other words, these tales have real stakes for both their authors and their audiences, and shed light on Muslim communal concerns from the late eighth through to the fourteenth century. Brooke Olson Vuckovic's groundbreaking study provides readers access to the documentation and translation of these lesser-known Arabic texts, and uncovers their role in building a meaningful, cohesive and coherent Muslim community in medieval times.

Why do we remember some parts of the historical past, and forget others? Collective memory acts as a filter, a process mediated by ideology, chance, and the very structures of narrative and memory. "Remembering the Early Modern Voyage "uses three rich case studies to examine the operations of memory on the sixteenth and seventeenth century origins of Anglophone North America: Richard Hakluyt's famous anthology of Elizabethan voyages, Captain John Smith's eccentric autobiography, and the little known history of early modern Newfoundland. Attending not only to the narratives themselves, but to their use and reuse over several centuries, this book offers interrogations and recalibrations of a history still critical for the present.""

"Liberating Hellenism from the Ottoman Empire" explores two key historical episodes that have generally escaped the notice of modern Greece, the Near East, and their observers alike. In the midst of the highly charged context of West-East confrontation and with fundamental cultural and political issues at stake, these episodes prove to be exciting and important platforms from which to reexamine the age-old conflict. This book reaches beyond the standard sources to dig into the archives for important events that have fallen through the cracks of the study of emerging modern Greece and the Ottoman Empire. These events, in which French travel writing, literary fiction, antiquarianism, and nineteenth-century western and eastern geopolitics merge, invite us to redraw the outlines of mutually dependent Hellenism and Orientalism.

This new volume in the Routledge Medieval Casebooks series explores medieval rhetorical practices. Ten original essays examine the ways in which contemporary readers and scholars might employ rhetorical theory to illuminate underlying meanings in medieval texts. The contributors also explore how rhetoric was used as a means of textual innovation in the work of medieval authors such as Chaucer and his contemporaries.

This volume of essays offers innovations in teaching Chaucer in higher education. The projects explored in this study focus on a student-centred, active learning designed to enhance independent research skills and critical thinking. These studies also seek to establish conversations - between teachers and learners, and students and their texts.

Studies in the Age of Chaucer is the annual yearbook of the New Chaucer Society, publishing articles on the writing of Chaucer and his contemporaries, their antecedents and successors, and their intellectual and social contexts. More generally, articles explore the culture and writing of later medieval Britain (1200-1500). Each SAC volume also includes an annotated bibliography and reviews of Chaucer-related publications.

Hierocles of Alexandria was a Neoplatonic philosopher of the fifth century AD. Hermann S. Schibli surveys his life, writings, and pagan and Christian surroundings, and succinctly examines the major points of his philosophy, both contemplative and practical. He includes the first modern English translations, with helpful notes, of Hierocles' Commentary on the Golden Verses of the Pythagoreans and of the remnants of his treatise On Providence.

Stanley Lombardo's deft abridgment of his 2005 translation of the Aeneid preserves the arc and weight of Virgil's epic by presenting major books in their entirety and abridged books in extended passages seamlessly fitted together with narrative bridges. W. R. Johnson's Introduction, a shortened version of his masterly Introduction to that translation, will be welcomed by both beginning and seasoned students of the Aeneid , and by students of Roman history, classical mythology, and Western civilization.

This book offers an examination of Cicero's speech, the "Pro Balbo," which was delivered during a momentous period of Roman history, in defence of a highly influential political advisor of Caesar who was charged under the "lex Papia" for an illegal grant of citizenship. The first detailed study of the speech, this study analyzes the work according to the ancient rhetorical categories: types of arguments ("inventio": ethos, pathos and logos), the arrangement of these arguments ("dispositio"), and the use of style ("elocutio"). Kimberly Barber takes a thorough look at Cicero's technique, providing an understanding of the speech and illuminating the rhetorical issues raised by its legal context.

An invigorating annual for those who are interested in medieval textual cultures and open to ways in which diverse post-modern methodologies may be applied to them. Alcuin Blamires, Review of English Studies New Medieval Literatures is an annual of work on medieval textual cultures, aiming to engage with intellectual and cultural pluralism in the Middle Ages and now. Its scope is inclusive of work across the theoretical, archival, philological, and historicist methodologies associated with medieval literary studies, and embraces both the British Isles and Europe. Essays in this volume engage with real and metaphorical relations between humans and nonhumans, with particular focus on spiders, hawks, and demons; discuss some of the earliest Middle English musical and, it is argued, liturgical compositions; describe the generic flexibility and literariness of medical discourse;consider strategies of affective and practical devotion, and their roles in building a community; and offer an example of the creativity of fifteenth-century vernacular religious literature. Texts discussed include the Old English riddles and Alfredian translations of the psalms; the lives of saints Dunstan, Godric, and Juliana, in Latin and English; Piers Plowman, in fascinating juxtaposition with Hugh of Fouilloy's Aviarium; medical remedybooks and uroscopies, many from unedited manuscripts; and the fifteenth-century English Life of Job. LAURA ASHE is Professor of English at the University of Oxford and Fellow and Tutor at Worcester College, Oxford; PHILIP KNOX is University Lecturer in English and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge; WENDY SCASE is Geoffrey Shepherd Professor of Medieval English Literature at the University of Birmingham; DAVID LAWTON is Professor of English at Washington University in St Louis. Contributors: Jenny C. Bledsoe, Heather Blurton, Hannah Bower, Megan Cavell, Cathy Hume, Hilary Powell, Isabella Wheater

The Narrative Grotesque examines late medieval narratology in two Older Scots poems: Gavin Douglas's The Palyce of Honour (c.1501) and William Dunbar's The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo (c.1507). The narrative grotesque is exemplified in these poems, which fracture narratological boundaries by fusing disparate poetic forms and creating hybrid subjectivities. Consequently, these poems interrogate conventional boundaries in poetic making. The narrative grotesque is applied as a framework to elucidate these chimeric texts and to understand newly late medieval engagement with poetics and narratology. -- .

Studies in the Age of Chaucer is the annual yearbook of the New Chaucer Society, publishing articles on the writing of Chaucer and his contemporaries, their antecedents and successors, and their intellectual and social contexts. More generally, articles explore the culture and writing of later medieval Britain (1200-1500). Each SAC volume also includes an annotated bibliography and reviews of Chaucer-related publications.

This book addresses the vexed status of literary value. Unlike other approaches, it pursues neither an apologetic thesis about literature's defining values nor, conversely, a demystifying account of those values' ideological uses. Instead, arguing that the category of literary value is inescapable, it focuses pragmatically on everyday scholarly and pedagogical activities, proposing how we may reconcile that category's inevitability with our understandable wariness of its uncertainties and complicities. Toward these ends, it offers a preliminary theory of literary valuing and explores the problem of literary value in respect to the literary edition, canonicity and interpretation. Much of this exploration occurs within Chaucer studies, which, because of Chaucer's simultaneous canonicity and marginality, provides fertile ground for thinking through the problem's challenges. Using this subfield as a synecdoche, the book seeks to forge a viable rationale for literary studies generally. -- .

This study offers new approaches for considering the unique narrative possibilities of fairies in medieval romance, from Geoffrey of Monmouth's "Historia Regum Britannie" to Thomas Malory's "Morte d'Arthur." James Wade provides a counter-reading to theories of the Celtic origins of medieval fairies and suggests ways in which these unusual figures can help us think about the internal logics of medieval romance.

The foremost critical edition of the Greek lyric poets: Alcman, Stesichorus, Ibycus, Anacreon, Simonides and Corinna, and other minor poets, and songs and fragments.

Series Information:
Studies in Medieval History and Culture: Outstanding Dissertations

This volume is part of a collection of facsimile reprints integrating a wide range of Dante scholarship in eight thematic volumes. Illuminating the cosmos of Dante and providing the knowledge of a full range of fundamental ideas, issues, events and beliefs that characterized the world view of Dante's age. Dante's work has produced a prodigious body of secondary literature edited here for their exceptional quality and importance.

The careers of Philip II and his son Alexander the Great (III) were interlocked in innumerable ways: Philip II centralized ancient Macedonia, created an army of unprecedented skill and flexibility, came to dominate the Greek peninsula, and planned the invasion of the Persian Empire with a combined Graeco-Macedonian force, but it was Alexander who actually led the invading forces, defeated the great Persian Empire, took his army to the borders of modern India, and created a monarchy and empire that, despite its fragmentation, shaped the political, cultural, and religious world of the Hellenistic era. Alexander drove the engine his father had built, but had he not done so, Philip's achievements might have proved as ephemeral as had those of so many earlier Macedonian rulers. On the other hand, some scholars believe that Alexander played a role, direct or indirect, in the murder of his father, so that he could lead the expedition to Asia that his father had organized. In short, it is difficult to understand or assess one without considering the other. This collection of previously unpublished articles looks at the careers and impact of father and son together. Some of the articles consider only one of the Macedonian rulers although most deal with both, and with the relationship, actual or imagined, between the two. The volume will contain articles on military and political history but also articles that look at the self-generated public images of Philip and Alexander, the counter images created by their enemies, and a number that look at how later periods understood them, concluding with the Hollywood depiction of the relationship. Despite the plethora of collected works that deal with Philip and Alexander, this volume promises to make a genuine contribution to the field by focusing specifically on their relationship to one another.

This book explores Roman love elegy from postcolonial perspectives, arguing that the tropes, conventions, and discourses of the Augustan genre serve to reinforce the imperial identity of its elite, metropolitan audience. Love elegy presents the phenomena and discourses of Roman imperialism-in terms of visual spectacle (the military triumph), literary genre (epic in relation to elegy), material culture (art and luxury goods), and geographic space-as intersecting with ancient norms of gender and sexuality in a way that reinforces Rome's dominance in the Mediterranean. The introductory chapter lays out the postcolonial frame, drawing from the work of Edward Said among other theorists, and situates love elegy in relation to Roman Hellenism and the varied Roman responses to Greece and its cultural influences. Four of the six subsequent chapters focus on the rhetorical ambivalence that characterizes love elegy's treatment of Greek influence: the representation of the domina or mistress as simultaneously a figure for 'captive Greece' and a trope for Roman imperialism; the motif of the elegiac triumph, with varying figures playing the triumphator, as suggestive of Greco-Roman cultural rivalry; Rome's competing visions of an Attic and an Asiatic Hellenism. The second and the final chapter focus on the figures of Osiris and Isis, respectively, as emblematic of Rome's colonialist and ambivalent representation of Egypt, with the conclusion offering a deconstructive reading of elegy's rhetoric of orientalism.

This book is a pioneering attempt to explore the fascinating and hardly known realm of reciting poetry in medieval and Renaissance Italy. The study of more than 50 treatises on both music and poetry, as well as other literary sources and documents from the period between 1300 and 1600, highlights above all the practice of parlar cantando («speaking through singing - the term found in De li contrasti, a fourteenth-century treatise on poetry) as rooted in the art of reciting verses. Situating the practice of parlar cantando in the context of late medieval poetic delivery, the author sheds new light on the origin and history of late Renaissance opera style, which their inventors called stile recitativo, rappresentativo or, exactly, parlar cantando. The deepest roots of the Italian tradition of parlar cantando are thus revealed, and the cultural background of the birth of opera is reinterpreted and revisited from the much broader perspective of what appears to be the most important Italian mode of music making between the age of Dante and Petrarch and the beginning of Italian opera around 1600.

York Notes Advanced offer a fresh and accessible approach to English Literature. This market-leading series has been completely updated to meet the needs of today's A-level and undergraduate students. Written by established literature experts, York Notes Advanced intorduce students to more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts.