This is a contemporary, eyewitness account of the life of Martin Luther translated into English. Johannes Cochlaeus (1479-1552) was present in the great hall at the Diet of Worms on April 18, 1521 when Luther made his famous declaration before Emperor Charles V: "Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen". Afterward, Cochlaeus sought Luther out, met him at his inn, and privately debated with him. Luther wrote of Cochlaeus, "may God long preserve this most pious man, born to guard and teach the Gospel of His church, together with His word, Amen". However, the confrontation left Cochlaeus convinced that Luther was an impious and malevolent man. Over the next 25 years, Cochlaeus barely escaped the Peasant's War with his life. He debated with Melanchthon and the reformers of Augsburg. It was Cochlaeus who conducted the authorities to the clandestine printing press in Cologne, where William Tyndale was preparing the first English translation of the New Testament (1525). For an eyewitness account of the Reformation - and the beginnings of the Catholic Counter-Reformation - no other historical document matches the first-hand experience of Cochlaeus. After Luther's death, it was rumoured that demons seized the reformer on his death-bed and dragged him off to Hell. In response to these rumours, Luther's friend and colleague, Philip Melanchthon wrote and published a brief encomium of the reformer in 1548. Cochlaeus consequently completed and published his monumental life of Luther in 1549. This volume brings the two documents head-to-head in a confrontation postponed for more than four hundred and fifty years. In addition, this book supplies a life of Cochlaeus, plus a full scholarly apparatus for readers who wish to make a broader study of the period.

First published in 1923, Exile and Other Poems is an important, poignant collection from one of the foremost Imagist war poets. Penned after witnessing the horrors of the frontline during the First World War, Aldington’s brutal, honest verse lays bare unimaginable experiences. The first part of the collection, ‘Exile’, explores the poet’s survivor’s guilt, post-traumatic stress and sense of alienation. The collection continues with a ‘Songs for Puritans’ and ‘Songs for Sensualists’, pastiches of seventeenth and eighteenth-century love poetry, and a series of more personal poems exploring the natural world, from which Aldington drew reassurance. Enriched with a fascinating introduction and explanatory notes by leading Aldington scholars Elizabeth Vandiver and Vivien Whelpton, this centenary edition seeks to place Exile firmly back on the map of war poetry, from which it has been missing for too long.

Elizabeth Vandiver examines the ways in which British poets of the First World War used classical literature, culture, and history as a source of images, ideas, and even phrases for their own poetry. Vandiver argues that classics was a crucial source for writers from a wide variety of backgrounds, from working-class poets to those educated in public schools, and for a wide variety of political positions and viewpoints. Poets used references to classics both to support and to oppose the war from its beginning all the way to the Armistice and after. By exploring the importance of classics in the poetry of the First World War, Vandiver offers a new perspective on that poetry and on the history of classics in British culture.

Elizabeth Vandiver examines the ways in which British poets of the First World War used classical literature, culture, and history as a source of images, ideas, and even phrases for their own poetry. Vandiver argues that classics was a crucial source for writers from a wide variety of backgrounds, from working-class poets to those educated in public schools, and for a wide variety of political positions and viewpoints. Poets used references to classics both to support and to oppose the war from its beginning all the way to the Armistice and after. By exploring the importance of classics in the poetry of the First World War, Vandiver offers a new perspective on that poetry and on the history of classics in British culture.

This important collection of essays both contributes to the expanding field of classical reception studies and seeks to extend it. Focusing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain, it looks at a range of different genres (epic, novel, lyric, tragedy, political pamphlet). Within the published texts considered, the usual range of genres dealt with elsewhere is extended by chapters on books for children, and those in which childhood and memories of childhood are informed by antiquity; and also by a multi-genre case study of a highly unusual subject, Spartacus. "Remaking the Classics" also goes beyond books to dramatic performance, and beyond the theatre to radio - a medium of enormous power and influence from the 1920s to the 1960s, whose role in the reception of classics is largely unexplored. The variety of genres and of media considered in the book is balanced both by the focus on Britain in a specific time period, and by an overlap of subject-matter between chapters: the three chapters on twentieth-century drama, for example, range from performance strategies to post-colonial contexts. The book thus combines the consolidation of a field with an attempt to push it in new and exciting directions.