Literary Studies: Classical, Early & Medieval

How does a written literature come into being within an oral culture, and how does such a literature achieve and maintain its authority? Joseph Fal...

"Menis opens for consideration an immense range of significant poetic possibilities, not the least of which is that of an ethical sense for the ter...

In medieval Europe, the word fama denoted both talk (what was commonly said about a person or event) and an individual's ensuing reputation (one's ...

Chamberlin's focal point for this synthesis is the concept of ambiguity, which has played an important role in the liberal arts tradition and in me...

Rebecca Krug argues that in the later Middle Ages, people defined themselves in terms of family relationships but increasingly saw their social cir...

Why did medieval dramatists weave so many scenes of torture into their plays? Exploring the cultural connections among rhetoric, law, drama, litera...

"Holy men despise women...and view them as foul and sticking dirt in the road," asserst the male author of the fifteenth-century Book to a Mother. ...

A study in poetic interaction, The "Odyssey" in Athens explores the ways in which narrative structure and parallels within and between epic poems c...

Jenny Jochens captures in fascinating detail the lives of women in pagan and early Christian Iceland and Norway—their work, sexual behavior, marria...

One of the special charms of the Odyssey, according to Charles Segal, is the way it transports readers to fascinating places. Yet despite the appea...

Every poet arrives at some sense of how language works. Chaucer's engagement, like that of the greatest literary figures, goes beyond the brilliant...

Applying linguistic theory to the study of Homeric style, Egbert J. Bakker offers a highly innovative approach to oral poetry, particularly the poe...

Oral epic poetry is still performed by Turkic singers in Central Asia. On trips to the region, Karl Reichl collected heroic poems from the Uzbek, K...

Some critics of the Roman historian Livy (59 B.C.-A.D. 17) have dismissed his work as a compendium of stale narratives and conventional attitudes. ...

The Icelandic sagas, composed between the twelfth and the nineteenth centuries, are one of the world's great literary treasures. After an extended ...

Assessing the relationship between the emergence of modern French literary culture and the ideological debates that marked Renaissance France, Timo...

Anne Thompson here gives the fullest account and explanation to date of the diversity of the more than sixty manuscripts of the South English Legen...

A sport and a military exercise, hunting involved aggressive action with weapons and dogs, and pursuit to the point of combat and killing, for the ...

Since Chapman made his famous translation at the end of the Elizabethan period, Homer and the translation of his works have had a central place in ...

This book treats separately all four poems: Pearl, Cleanness, Patience and Sir Gawain. There are also chapters on: the history of the poems and the...

'Consuming Narratives' is a collection of essays dealing with the relevance of the concept and metaphor of appetite for understanding writing, poli...

In a major revisionary approach to ancient Greek culture, Sarah Morris invokes as a paradigm the myths surrounding Daidalos to describe the profoun...