This volume offers an overview of Byzantine manuscript illustration, a central branch of Byzantine art and culture. Just like written texts, illustrations bear witness to Byzantine material culture, imperial ideology and religious beliefs, as well as to the development and spread of Byzantine art. In this sense illustrated books reflect the society that produced and used them. Being portable, they could serve as diplomatic gifts or could be acquired by foreigners. In such cases they became "emissaries" of Byzantine art and culture in Western Europe and the Arabic world. The volume provides for the first time a comprehensive overview of the material, divided by text categories, including both secular and religious manuscripts, and analyses which texts were illustrated in Byzantium, and how. Contributors are Justine M. Andrews, Leslie Brubaker, Annemarie W. Carr, Elina Dobrynina, Maria Evangelatou, Maria Laura Tomea Gavazzoli, Markos Giannoulis, Cecily Hennessy, Ioli Kalavrezou, Maja Kominko, Sofia Kotzabassi, Stavros Lazaris, Kallirroe Linardou, Vasileios Marinis, Kathleen Maxwell, Georgi R. Parpulov, Nancy P. Sevcenko, Jean-Michel Spieser, Mika Takiguchi, Courtney Tomaselli, Marina Toumpouri, Nicolette S. Trahoulia, Vasiliki Tsamakda, and Elisabeth Yota.

In this ground-breaking book, Alison Milbank explains why a comprehension of the Victorian reception of Dante is essential for a full understanding of Victorianism as a whole. Her focus on this much-neglected topic allows her to reconfigure the British nineteenth-century understanding of history, nationalism, aesthetics and gender, and their often strange intersections. The account also builds towards a demonstration that the modernist perpetuation of the Dante obsession reveals an equal continuity with many aspects of Victorianism. The book provides not only an authoritative introduction to these important cultural themes, but also a re-reading of the genealogy of literature in the modern period. Instead of the Victorian realism challenged by Modernist symbolism's attempts to transcend linear time, Milbank offers us a contrary, continuous 'Danteism'. For both the Victorians and the Modernists Dante is the first writer to historicise, fictionalise and humanise the eternal role, and he becomes paradoxically the means by which history, secularised fiction and a positivist humanism could be reconnected to a lost transcendent. Dante and the Victorians provides the first comprehensive account of why the reading of Dante was central to nineteenth-century British language and culture. -- .

The "Enchiridion" or "Handbook" of the first-century AD Stoic Epictetus was used as an ethical treatise both in Christian monasteries and by the sixth-century pagan Neoplatonist Simplicius. Simplicius chose it for beginners, rather than Aristotle's "Ethics", because it presupposed no knowledge of logic. We thus get a fascinating chance to see how a pagan Neoplatonist transformed Stoic ideas. The text was relevant to Simplicius because he too, like Epictetus, was teaching beginners how to take the first steps towards eradicating emotion, although he is unlike Epictetus in thinking that they should give up public life rather than acquiesce, if public office is denied them. Simplicius starts from a Platonic definition of the person as rational soul, not body, ignoring Epictetus' further whittling down of himself to just his will or policy decisions. He selects certain topics for special attention in chapters 1, 8, 27 and 31. Things are up to us, despite Fate. Our sufferings are not evil, but providential attempts to turn us from the body. Evil is found only in the human soul. But evil is parasitic (Proclus' term) on good. The gods exist, are provident, and cannot be bought off. With nearly all of this the Stoics would agree, but for quite different reasons, and their own distinctions and definitions are to a large extent ignored. This translation of the "Handbook" is published in two volumes. This is the first, covering chapters 1-26; the second covers chapters 27-53.

This book explores the construction of gender ideology in early modern England through an analysis of the querelle des femmes --the debate about the relationship between the sexes that originated on the continent during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and developed in England into the Swetnam controversy. The volume contextualizes the debate in terms of its continental antecedents and elite manuscript circulation in England, then moves to consider popular culture and printed texts, its effects on women’s writing and the developing discourse on gender, and concludes by examining the ramifications of the debate during the Civil War and Restoration. Essays focus on the implications of the gender debate for women writers and their literary relations, cultural ideology and the family, and political discourse and ideas of nationhood.

The construction of a new Latin library between the end of the Republic and the Augustan Principate was anything but an inhibiting factor. The literary flourishing of the Flavian age shows that awareness of this canon rather stimulated creative tension. In the changing socio-cultural context, daring innovations transform the genres of poetry and prose. This volume, which collects papers by influential scholars of early Imperial literature, sheds light on the productive dynamics of the ancient genre system and can also offer insightful perspectives to a non-classicist readership.

This is a set of essays from many of the leading scholars in the world of medieval studies, which addresses a wide diversity of texts and genres and their diverse perspectives on love. Attention is given to interaction between English writings and putative continental and international influences, with particular emphasis on the works of Chaucer.

In De cura pro mortuis gerenda Augustine interweaves an assessment of burial near the memorial of a martyr with a series of dream narratives. The seeming lack of coherence between argument and narrative in this treatise has puzzled many scholars. Combining an analysis of the overall structure of the argument and a detailed philological commentary, this study shows that Augustine's text forms a well-composed unity. The study is based on discourse-linguistic and narratological concepts as well as an analysis of the global structure of the narratives. Relying on this combined approach Rose demonstrates how Augustine explores the full breadth of his narrative material in the service of his argument. In addition, this book situates Augustine's text in its cultural-historical context.

Aristotle's Poetics is the first philosophical account of an art form and the foundational text in aesthetics. The Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Aristotle and the Poetics is an accessible guide to this often dense and cryptic work. Angela Curran introduces and assesses: Aristotle's life and the background to the Poetics the ideas and text of the Poetics the continuing importance of Aristotle's work to philosophy today.

This book is about Virgil's ideas of nature, landscape, history, and patriotism. It is also concerned with ideas of nature throughout antiquity and with the poetry and culture of the 1st century BC as a whole. It combines a close reading of Virgil's texts with a broad vision of the revolution in Western sensibility they helped to effect.

"Constructing Chaucer "examines the scholarly appropriation and manipulation of Geoffrey Chaucer since his death in 1400 and seeks to enhance the theoretical dialogue on the famous author's reception history by challenging long-standing assumptions about the "Father of English Poetry." In response to the academy's recent disregard for the narrative persona-construct that was especially prominent in medieval literatures, this book offers a new and historically-based version of persona-theory and applies the paradigm to the reception of key texts where Chaucer's use of the persona is most acute. This method is centered upon the fresh concept of "autofiction," which is offered in order to recuperate and revitalize the persona as a critical tool. By applying the theory of autofiction to Chaucer's verse, Gust questions age-old traditions, presents a series of provocative new interpretations, and fosters a more complete understanding of the ideologies of Chaucer criticism.

A significant trend in the study of Greek and Roman historiographers is to accept that their works are to a degree both science and fiction. As scholarly interest broadens, in addition to evaluating ancient historians on the basis of the reliability of the information they record, and verifying the narratives against various elements of the material (inscriptions, excavations, numismatics), new studies are beginning to elaborate on the stylistic and narrative qualities of the texts themselves. The present volume offers a fine collection of essays that on the whole emphasize the literary dimensions of the ancient Greek and Roman historians. Offering narratological, linguistic, and theoretical approaches to historiography, the contributors of the book elaborate on the intersections between historiography and other literary genres, the literary manipulation of military events and the criteria of selectivity, the reception of ancient historical texts in other genres, time and space in historical narrative, and plenty of other relevant topics. The shared belief of the authors is that there is a close interrelation between the literary features and the scientific value of ancient Greek and Roman historiography.

Guynn offers an innovative new approach to the ethical, cultural, and ideological analysis of medieval allegory. Working between poststructuralism and historical materialism, he considers both the playfulness of allegory (its openness to multiple interpretations and perspectives) and its disciplinary force (the use of rhetoric to naturalize hegemonies and suppress difference and dissent). Ultimately, he argues that both tendencies can be linked to the consolidation of power within ruling class institutions and the persecution of demonized others, notably women and sexual minorities. The book examines a number of centrally canonical works, including the verse romance "Eneas," Alan of Lille's "De planctu Naturae," "The Romance of the Rose," and the "Querelle de la Rose."

This collection is the work of scholars on Middle English, Insular French and Medieval Latin writings of the late twelfth century in England and its possessions, when an English-speaking populace was ruled by a French-speaking aristocracy and administered by a Latin-speaking and writing clergy. The political discourses of Henry's reign are acknowledged, developed and ironised within the first real flowering of so many vernacular genres, romance and history in particular. The energetic and intrepid writers of this period are examined in relation to the development of social institutions and emergent ideas of 'nationhood', as the literature of Henry's court is shown to act as an echo-chamber within which anxieties about the proper exercise of power in a legal order founded on martial conquest could be reflected and soothed.

Arabic literary salons emerged in ninth-century Iraq and, by the tenth, were flourishing in Baghdad and other urban centers. In an age before broadcast media and classroom education, salons were the primary source of entertainment and escape for middle- and upper-rank members of society, serving also as a space and means for educating the young. Although salons relied on a culture of oral performance from memory, scholars of Arabic literature have focused almost exclusively on the written dimensions of the tradition. That emphasis, argues Samer Ali, has neglected the interplay of oral and written, as well as of religious and secular knowledge in salon society, and the surprising ways in which these seemingly discrete categories blurred in the lived experience of participants. Looking at the period from 500 to 1250, and using methods from European medieval studies, folklore, and cultural anthropology, Ali interprets Arabic manuscripts in order to answer fundamental questions about literary salons as a social institution. He identifies salons not only as sites for socializing and educating, but as loci for performing literature and oral history; for creating and transmitting cultural identity; and for continually reinterpreting the past. A fascinating recovery of a key element of humanistic culture, Ali's work will encourage a recasting of our understanding of verbal art, cultural memory, and daily life in medieval Arab culture.

This stimulating and accessible volume is a helpful, reliable and adaptable resource for students of Chaucer at all levels.

Using an entirely new structure which highlights issues and themes, the "Companion" encourages movement across different Chaucerian compositions and beyond literary frames of reference, moving from textual analysis to cultural context and back again.

Whether the reader of Chaucer is curious about language, Christianity, eroticism, astrology, concepts of the self, pilgrimage, violence, heresy, London, or any of a host of other topics, this book will provide food for thought. Each of these original and accessible essays, written by an internationally distinguished team of Chaucer scholars, provides an account of the key issues, applies these to specific passages in Chaucer's work and includes an annotated bibliography.

The chapters are arranged alphabetically by topic, and broken down into compact sections for ease of use. The "Companion" is also fully cross-referenced, encouraging students to explore particular themes further.

Designed both as a contribution to original research and as a text for students, "A Companion to Chaucer" is an essential resource for everyone involved in Chaucer studies.

Ovid was the most influential and widely imitated of all classical Latin poets. This volume publishes papers delivered at a conference on the Reception of Ovid in March 2013, jointly organised by the Institute of Classical Studies and the Warburg Institute, University of London. It presents studies of the impact of Ovid's work on Renaissance commentators, on neo-Latin poetry and epistolography, on Renaissance engravers, on poets like Dante, Mantuan, Pontano, Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, Lodge, Weever, Milton and Cowley and on artists including Correggio and Rubens. The main focus of the volume is inevitably the afterlife of the Metamorphoses but it also includes discussions of the impact of Heroides, Fasti, and Ibis, and publishes for the first time a Latin verse life of Ovid composed around 1460 by Bernardo Moretti. Contributors are Helene Casanova-Robin, Frank T. Coulson, Fatima Diez-Plazas, Ingo Gildenhard, Philip Hardie, Maggie Kilgour, Gesine Manuwald, Elizabeth McGrath, John Miller, Victoria Moul, Caroline Stark, and Herica Valladares.

This translation, first published in 1992, presents one of the most memorable poems of the 'romance' genre of medieval literature, largely because it contains a number of surprises and falsified expectations. Jaufre, the hero, arrives at the court of King Arthur with a total and naive faith in the King and his ability to effect a total transformation in his followers by inducting them into the order of knighthood. As his quest proceeds, he learns the mistake in his over-idealised view of chivalry and his uncompromising view of pure justice, untempered by mercy. By charting the choices Jaufre makes in military and amorous encounters and the effectiveness of his responses to social trials and temptations, the audience discerns the route to independent adulthood, prestige and virtue, as the poet conceives of them. This fascinating reissue will be of particular value to students and academics researching the concepts typically explored within medieval ballads and romances.

Jeremy Citrome employs the language of contemporary psychoanalysis to explain how surgical metaphors became an important tool of ecclesiastical power in the wake of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. Pastoral, theological, recreational, and medical writings are among the texts discussed in this wide-ranging study.

A number of ancient novelists were skilful storytellers and resourceful literary artists, and their works are often carefully individualised presentations of an ancient and distinguished heritage. Ancient Fiction, first published in 1984, examines the tales retold by these novelists in light of more recently discovered Near Eastern texts, and in this way offers a tentative solution to Rohde's celebrated problem about the origins of the Greek novel. Among the surprises that emerge are an ancient stratum of the Arabian Nights and a possible Tristan-Romance, as well as an animal Satyricon and a human Golden Ass. This new framework is, however, incidental to an examination of the achievements of ancient novelists in their own right. In presenting character, structuring narrative, imposing a veneer of sophistication or contriving a religious ethos, these writers demonstrate that their work is worthy of sympathetic study, rather dismissal as the pulp fiction of the ancient world.

Two thousand years after his death Horace is still recognised as a unique poet, having exerted marked influence on later European literature. This collection, first published in 1973, explores the different aspects of Horace's poetic achievement in his main works: the Odes, Epistles Satires and Ars Poetica. The essays, written by internationally-known scholars, include a discussion of the three worlds of the Satires, and a study of Horace's poetic craft in the Odes - his greatest technical accomplishment. The final chapter is devoted entirely to Horace's reputation in England up to the seventeenth century as 'The Best of Lyrick Poets', and concentrates on the many English translations which he inspired. The expert criticism is illustrated throughout by English translations from the original Latin texts. Horace will appeal to students and scholars of Latin poetry alike, as well as to those interested in the reception of classical literature throughout European history.

In Stagecraft in Euripides, first published in 1985, Professor Michael Halleran examines certain aspects of the dramaturgy of the most extensively preserved Attic tragedian. Although the ancient dramatic texts do not contain performance directions, they do imply stage actions. This work explores the ways Euripides utilises the latter to make a point: to underline some issue, to suggest a contrast, or to shift the focus of the drama. Specifically, Halleran investigates the rearrangement of characters on stage at the major structural junctures of the play: entrances and their announcements; preparation for and surprise in entrances; and dramatic connections between exits and entrances. Three plays from the same era - Herakles, Trojan Women and Ion - are discussed in greater detail to reveal the potential of this approach for illuminating Euripides' 'grammar of dramatic technique'. Stagecraft in Euripides will thus appeal to students of theatre and drama as well as classicists.

Medieval writers were fascinated by fortune and misfortune, yet the critical problems raised by such explorations have not been adequately theorized. Allan Mitchell invites us to consider these contingencies in relation to an "ethics of the event." His book examines how Middle English writers including Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, and Malory treat unpredictable events such as sexual attraction, political disaster, social competition, traumatic accidents, and the textual condition itself--locating in fortune the very potentiality of ethical life. While earlier scholarship has detailed the iconography of Lady Fortune, this book alters and advances the conversation so that we see fortune less as a negative exemplum than as a positive sign of radical phenomena.

Menander set Perikeiromene, or the `Woman with shorn head' in Corinth, famous for its beautiful women, at a time when the city's troubles were at their height owing to the Macedonian conquest of Greece. The story reflects in miniature some of the turbulence of the times. A mercenary soldier Polemon returns home from service to discover, as he thinks, that his girl, Glykera, has found another lover. In a fit of jealous rage he shears off her hair and goes off to drown his sorrows with companions. Glykera promptly moves out from Polemon's house to the neighbour's house, in which her purported new lover Moschion lives. But all is not as it seems... Typically for the genre of New Comedy, Menander takes his characters to the brink in this lively drama before the recognitions which set everything straight. Discoveries of fragmented manuscripts of this play in the twentieth century have more or less brought it back to life.

Work in Progress offers an in-depth study of the role of literary revision in the compositional practices and representational strategies of Roman authors at the end of the republic and the beginning of the principate. It focuses on Cicero, Horace, Quintilian, Martial, and Pliny the Younger, but also offers discussions of Isocrates, Plato, and Hellenistic poetry. The book's central argument is that revision made textuality into a medium of social exchange. Revisions were not always made by authors working alone: often, they were the result of conversations between an author and friends or literary contacts, and these conversations exemplified a commitment to collective debate and active collaboration. Revision was thus much more than an unavoidable element in literary genesis: it was one way in which authorship became a form of social agency. Consequently, when we think about revision for authors of the late republic and early empire we should not think solely of painstaking attendance to craft aimed exclusively at the perfection of a literary work. Nor should we think of the resulting texts as closed and invariant statements sent from an author to his reader. So long as an author was still willing to revise, his text served as a temporary platform around and in which a community came into being.
The theories of revision that guide the author's study come from the new genetic criticism that has been successfully applied, especially in Europe, to modern authors. While many of the tools of analysis applicable to modern authors (author-written manuscripts, corrected proofs, etc.) are not available for ancient authors, Sean Gurd has amassed a surprising number of passages in ancient texts about revision, its importance to the author, and the circle of critics involved in the process of rewriting.