A Handbook to the Reception of Ovid presents more than 30 original essays written by leading scholars revealing the rich diversity of critical engagement with Ovid's poetry that spans the Western tradition from antiquity to the present day. Offers innovative perspectives on Ovid…
Game of Thrones is famously inspired by the Middle Ages - but how "authentic" is the world it presents? This volume offers different angles to the question. One of the biggest attractions of George R.R. Martin's high fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, and by extension its HB…
Rational persuasion and appeal to an audience's emotions are elements of most literature, but they are found in their purest form in oratory. The speeches written by the Greek Orators for delivery in law-courts, deliberative councils and assemblies enjoyed an honoured literary s…
Over six hundred years before John Milton's <i>Paradise Lost</i>, Anglo-Saxon authors told their own version of the fall of the angels. This book brings together various cultural moments, literary genres and relevant comparanda to recover that version, from the legal and social …
The Chronicon of Thietmar of Merseburg has long been recognised as one of the most important sources for the history of the tenth and early eleventh centuries, especially for the history of the Ottonian Empire. Thietmar's testimony also has special value because of his geographi…
Aristophanes: Ecclesiazusae
by Sommerstein, Alan H., Aristophanes
fromAris & Phillips Classical Texts
Ecclesiazusae, probably produced in 391 BC, is at once a typically Aristophanic fantasy of gender inversion, obscenity and farce, the earliest surviving work in the western Utopian tradition, and the source of a blueprint for a communist society on which Plato may well have draw…
The cultural category of monster is the key to understanding the 'Mirabilia' by Phlegon of Tralles. Applied to Phlegon's 35 marvelous stories, this category allows all his reported cases to be defined as either hybrid creatures, or as beings monstrous in terms of scale, size or …
Humankind has always been fascinated by the world in which it finds itself, and puzzled by its relations to it. Today that fascination is often expressed in what is now called 'green' terms, reflecting concerns about the non-human natural world, puzzlement about how we relate to…
The History of English Affairs , covering the years 1066-1197, was written at the close of the twelfth century and has been described as being "both in substance and in form ... the finest historical work left to us by an Englishman of the twelfth century" ( The Dictionary of Na…
This is the first English translation of two chronicles of long-acknowledged importance to European history in the period c.850-c.950. This period, which is widely taught in European and North American universities, saw the collapse of the Carolingian Empire and the rise in Germ…
Examining the tremendous importance of water for European medieval literature, this book focuses on a large number of writers and poets. Water proves to be highly meaningful in religious, literary and factual narratives insofar as it emerges as a central catalyst to bring about …
Relics and writing in late medieval England uncovers a wide-ranging medieval discourse that had an expansive influence on English literary traditions. Drawing from Latin and vernacular hagiography, miracle stories, relic lists, and architectural history, this study demonstrates …
The History of English Affairs, covering the years 10661198, was written at the close of the twelfth century and has been described as being "both in substance and in form ... the finest historical work left to us by an Englishman of the twelfth century" (The Dictionary of Natio…
The surviving works of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides have been familiar to readers and theatregoers for centuries; but these works are far outnumbered by their lost plays. Between them these authors wrote around two hundred tragedies, the fragmentary remains of which are ut…
Dio Cassius, too often consulted just as a historical source, was an historian of considerable interest and originality - at once a Greek man of letters and a late representative of the Roman tradition of senatorial historical writing. For the reign of Augustus his history is th…
Appian wrote his Roman History in the second century AD as a series of books arranged geographically to chronicle the rise of the Roman Empire. His Iberike, of which this is the first translation with historical commentary in English, deals with the Romans' wars in the Iberian p…
A much-needed study of pre-Islamic poetry from Arabia, which fills a key gap in understanding not only the history of Arabian poetry, but also of Arabian ethos and ideology. What emerges is a complex, stylized discourse which reflects a distinctive cosmology.
This is not a commentary on Juvenal Satire 10 but a critical appreciation of the poem which examines it on its own and in context and tries to make it come alive as a piece of literature, offering one man's close reading of Satire 10 as poetry, and concerned with literary critic…