Explains the allegorical significance attached to Roman and Greek myths by Medieval and Renaissance authors. Included in the text are several hundred alphabetically-arranged entries for the gods, goddesses, heroes, heroines and places of classical myth and legend. Each entry includes an account of the myth, with reference to the Greek and Latin sources. The entry discusses how Medieval and Renaissance commentators interpreted the myth, and how poets, dramatists, and artists employed it in their art.

Classical mythology had a vigorous life long after the fall of Rome. Medieval commentators interpreted these myths allegorically. Throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, poets and playwrights such as Chaucer and Shakespeare drew upon classical myths to convey Christian beliefs allegorically. While readers of the Middle Ages and Renaissance could be expected to understand the allegorical significance of the ancient myths, contemporary readers are often unfamiliar with the veiled moralizations embedded in the mythological allusions of medieval and early modern authors.

While numerous classical dictionaries identify the figures and tales of Greek and Roman mythology, this reference book explains the allegorical significance attached to the myths by Medieval and Renaissance authors. Thus the reader who encounters an allusion to Hercules in a sixteenth-century drama can quickly discover that Hercules was often interpreted as a personification of virtue during the Renaissance, and that the labors of Hercules could represent the triumph of morality over vice. Included are several hundred alphabetically arranged entries for the gods, goddesses, heroes, heroines, and places of classical myth and legend. Each entry includes a brief account of the classical myth, with reference to the Greek and Latin sources. The entry then discusses how Medieval and Renaissance commentators interpreted the myth allegorically, and how poets, dramatists, and artists employed the allegorization of the myth in their creative works. Each entry includes a bibliography, and the volume concludes with appendices and an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources.

American Indian Autobiography is a kind of cultural kaleidoscope whose narratives come to us from a wide range of American Indians: warriors, farmers, Christian converts, rebels and assimilationists, peyotists, shamans, hunters, Sun Dancers, artists and Hollywood Indians, spiritualists, visionaries, mothers, fathers, and English professors. Many of these narratives are as-told-to autobiographies, and those who labored to set them down in writing are nearly as diverse as their subjects. Black Elk had a poet for his amanuensis; Maxidiwiac, a Hidatsa farmer who worked her fields with a bone-blade hoe, had an anthropologist. Two Leggings, the man who led the last Crow war party, speaks to us through a merchant from Bismarck, North Dakota. White Horse Eagle, an aged Osage, told his story to a Nazi historian. By discussing these remarkable narratives from a historical perspective, H. David Brumble III reveals how the various editors' assumptions and methods influenced the autobiographies as well as the autobiographers. Brumble also-and perhaps most importantly-describes the various oral autobiographical traditions of the Indians themselves, including those of N. Scott Momaday and Leslie Marmon Silko. American Indian Autobiography includes an extensive bibliography; this Bison Books edition features a new introduction by the author.