This book tells the story of the early modern astronomer Johannes Kepler's Somnium, which has been regarded by science historians and literary critics alike as the first true example of science fiction. Kepler began writing his complex and heavily-footnoted tale of a fictional Icelandic astronomer as an undergraduate and added to it throughout his life. The Somnium fuses supernatural and scientific models of the cosmos through a satirical defense of Copernicanism that features witches, lunar inhabitants, and a daemon who speaks in the empirical language of modern science. Swinford's looks at the ways that Kepler's Somnium is influenced by the cosmic dream, a literary genre that enjoyed considerable popularity among medieval authors, including Geoffrey Chaucer, Dante, John of Salisbury, Macrobius, and Alan of Lille. He examines the generic conventions of the cosmic dream, also studying the poetic and theological sensibilities underlying the categories of dreams formulated by Macrobius and Artemidorus that were widely used to interpret specific symbols in dreams and to assess their overall reliability. Swinford develops a key claim about the form of the Somnium as it relates to early science: Kepler relies on a genre that is closely connected to a Ptolemaic, or earth-centered, model of the cosmos as a way of explaining and justifying a model of the cosmos that does not posit the same connections between the individual and the divine that are so important for the Ptolemaic model. In effect, Kepler uses the cosmic dream to describe a universe that cannot lay claim to the same correspondences between an individual's dream and the order of the cosmos understood within the rules of the genre itself. To that end, Kepler's Somnium is the first example of science fiction, but the last example of Neoplatonic allegory.

This book tells the story of the early modern astronomer Johannes Kepler s Somnium, which has been regarded by science historians and literary critics alike as the first true example of science fiction. Kepler began writing his complex and heavily-footnoted tale of a fictional Icelandic astronomer as an undergraduate and added to it throughout his life. The Somnium fuses supernatural and scientific models of the cosmos through a satirical defense of Copernicanism that features witches, lunar inhabitants, and a daemon who speaks in the empirical language of modern science. Swinford s looks at the ways that Kepler s Somnium is influenced by the cosmic dream, a literary genre that enjoyed considerable popularity among medieval authors, including Geoffrey Chaucer, Dante, John of Salisbury, Macrobius, and Alan of Lille. He examines the generic conventions of the cosmic dream, also studying the poetic and theological sensibilities underlying the categories of dreams formulated by Macrobius and Artemidorus that were widely used to interpret specific symbols in dreams and to assess their overall reliability.

Swinford develops a key claim about the form of the Somnium as it relates to early science: Kepler relies on a genre that is closely connected to a Ptolemaic, or earth-centered, model of the cosmos as a way of explaining and justifying a model of the cosmos that does not posit the same connections between the individual and the divine that are so important for the Ptolemaic model. In effect, Kepler uses the cosmic dream to describe a universe that cannot lay claim to the same correspondences between an individual s dream and the order of the cosmos understood within the rules of the genre itself. To that end, Kepler s Somnium is the first example of science fiction, but the last example of Neoplatonic allegory.

Essays on the post-modern reception and interpretation of the Middle Ages, with a particular concentration on environmental matters. Ecoconcerns and ecocriticism are a rising trend in medievalism studies, and form a major focus of this collection. Topics under discussion in the first part of the volume include figurations in nineteenth- and twentieth-century medievalism; environmental medievalism in Sidney Lanier's Southern chivalry; nostalgia and loss in T.H. White's "forest sauvage"; and green medievalism in J.R.R. Tolkien's elven realms. The eleven subsequent articles continue to take in such themes more tangentially, testing and buillding on the methods and conclusions of the first part. Their subjects include John Aubrey's Middle Ages; medieval charter-horns in early modern England; nineteenth-centuryreimaginings of Chaucer's Griselda; Dante's influence on Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream"; multi-layered medievalisms in George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire; (coopted) feminism via medievalism inDisney's Maleficent; (neo)medievalism in Babylon 5 and Crusade; cosmopolitan anxieties and national identity in Netflix's Marco Polo; mapping Everealm in The Quest; undergraduate perceptions ofthe "medieval" and the "Middle Ages"; and medievalism in the prosopopeia and corpsepaint of Mayhem's De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas. Karl Fugelso is Professor of Art History at Towson University in Baltimore, Maryland. Contributors: Dustin M. Frazier Wood, Daniel Helbert, Ann F. Howey, Carol Jamison, Ann M. Martinez, Kara L. McShane, Lisa Myers, Elan Justice Pavlinich, Katie Peebles, Scott Riley, Paul B. Sturtevant, Dean Swinford, Renee Ward, Angela Jane Weisl, Jeremy Withers.

David Fosberg plays guitar in Valhalla. But don't worry: this is no jukebox hero saga of his rise to fame and fortune. Valhalla's a death metal band. From Florida. And the rest of the guys just quit. There's not a lot of money in metal hymns to the Elder Gods. If David can record another album, Plutonic Records will send him on a two week tour to promote it. A Eurotour. Where people like metal.