bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
A Death in the First Act (Annals 1. 6)
Authors: Woodman A J
Published: November 2023

Tacitus begins his Annals with a brief preface, the last sentence of which sets out his programme for the rest of the work (1. 1. 3): The words pauca de Augusto refer to the first section of narrative from 1. 2. 1 (‘Postquam Bruto ….’) to 1. 4. 1 (‘. …dum Augustus’ aetate ualidus segue et domum et pacem sustentauit’); extrema (sc. de Augusto) refers to the second section from 1. 4. 2 (‘Postquam prouecta iam senectus aegro et corpore fatigabatur aderatque finis ….’) to 1. 5. 4 (‘simul excessisse Augustum et rerum potiri Neronem fama eadem tulit’); Tiberii principatum refers to the Tiberian narrative as a whole, which thus begins at 1. 6. 1 (‘Primum facinus noui principatus fuit . . .’) and ends with Tiberius’ obituary at 6. 51. 3; cetera refers to the remainder of the work, i.e. Book 7 (which is no longer extant) to the end (which is also no longer extant).
Praecipuum Munus Annalium The Construction, Convention, and Context of Annals 3. 65. I
Authors: Woodman A J
Published: November 2023

E. Fraenkel in the preface to his Horace reflected that on many occasions, when he thought he had disentangled himself from ‘the snares of traditional exegesis’, he found that he was ‘still interpreting not the words of Horace but the unwarranted opinion of some of his commentators’.1 Often it is the most familiar passages which are most resistant to such reinterpretation. In 1989 I suggested that one of the most famous passages in Tacitus’ Annals, his obituary of the emperor Tiberius (6. 51), had been misinterpreted by generations of readers.2 In the present paper I shall discuss another passage of the Annals, which is equally famous and which occurs during the narrative of AD 22 (3. 65. 1): Exsequi sententias hand institui nisi insignes per honestum aut notabili dedecore, quod praecipuum munus annalium reor, ne uirtutes sileantur utque prauis dictis factisque ex posteritate et infamia metus sit.
History and Alternative Histories
Authors: Woodman A J
Published: November 2023

Tacitus’ reputation as the greatest Roman historian rests chiefly on the Annals and Histories, which together produced a total of thirty volumes and, when complete,1 began with the death of Augustus in August AD 14 and ended eighty-two years later with the death of Domitian in September 96. The scale of treatment, which is ample, and the annalistic format, which is rigorously sustained throughout, alike served to remind his readers that Tacitus was writing history in the grand and time-honoured manner.
The Categories of Body and Soul
Authors: Clarke Michael
Published: November 2023

A person is a mass of living flesh who also thinks and feels and calls himself ‘I’. That is the only universal fact about the structure of human identity, and any further elaborations arc products of particular cultures and traditions: and because the ideas in question are intangible, and their expression often difficult and oblique, when we face an alien world-picture there is a temptation to pass its ideas through the filter provided by our own. I begin with a cautionary tale. Here is Frazer in the Golden Bough—a book that is still in print—with an anecdote to illustrate primitive beliefs about body and soul:
Primitive Wisdom and Stoic Exegesis after Posidonius
Authors: Coys-Stones G R
Published: November 2023

In the last chapter I looked at the way in which the early Stoics thought that the outlook of the first men came to be articulated into a technical understanding of nature, and at how scraps of this understanding were subsequently preserved as the seeds of the mythological tradition; and I suggested that the Stoics thought the recovery of these fragments was worthwhile in so far as they could be used as evidence to support the general direction in which Stoic philosophy was developing. But the full historical impact of this theory was, as I hope to show, not confined to its implications for the Greeks’ understanding of mythology, or for the Stoics’ ability to support the truth of their doctrines on the basis of it. By suggesting that authoritative philosophical insights might be obtained by a student of the past, the theory would ultimately lead to a revolution in the way that philosophy itself was done: as I shall argue in Chapters 6 and 7, the Stoics’ theory of the transmission through readily accessible cultural traditions of a primitive and authoritative wisdom would form the basis of the new approach to philosophy developed by the Platonists of the second century AD.
Divergence and Disagreement: The Platonist Alternative to Scepticism
Authors: Coys-Stones G R
Published: November 2023

As the dominant school of the later empire, and through the profound influence it had on the development of Christian theology, Platonism was to have a defining effect on the course of later Western philosophy. And everything that might be said about the nature of its effect must ultimately refer back to the revolutionary new model for philosophical research introduced through the Platonists’ ascription of authority to Plato under the definition set out in the previous chapter. The suggestion that the purpose of philosophy was to understand a truth that was already available (rather than to work towards finding that truth afresh), the primary focus on antiquity which this encouraged, the doctrinal systems themselves as they emerged from this process, must all be seen in terms of the unprecedented notion of authority ascribed by the Platonists to Plato. But the arguments outlined in the previous chapter still only tell half of the story. For, while they offer an explanation for the absolute authority of Plato, they can only properly succeed in explaining it to someone who thinks that Plato is right in the first place
Livy, Augustus, and Exempla
Authors: Chaplin Jane D
Published: November 2023

As we saw at the outset, the general tendency to treat lucretia as precisely the kind of historical lesson Livy has in mind in Preface 10 overlooks the fact no one ever profits from Lucretia’s experience. In fact, within a generation she vanishes from everyone’s memory but the narrator’s. But, as we have also seen, Livy’s use of exempla is far more nuanced than the construction of straightforward illustrative episodes, and, while Lucretia may not teach anyone within the text the price of female chastity, she does offer Livy’s external audience a helpful reminder of what history is all about. For with her final words, Lucretia behaves as if she has read the Preface, forecasting (albeit mistakenly) her own value as an example for others. Nor is she alone in doing so; throughout y’s narrative, his characters recognize the power of exempla, whether they are invoking, forging, or anticipating them. Hannibal is a particularly clear illustration.
Emperor Worship and Ron1an Religion
Authors: Gradel Ittai
Published: November 2023

While Roman religion worshipped a number of gods, one kind in particular aroused the fury of early Christians and the wonder of scholars: the cult of Roman emperors alive or dead. Was the divinity of emperors a glue that held the Empire together? Were rulers such as Julius Caesar and Caligula simply mad to expect such worship of themselves? Or was it rather a phenomenon which has only been rendered incomprehensible by modern and monotheistic ideas of what religion is - or should be - all about? This book presents the first study of emperor worship among the Romans themselves, in Rome and its heartland Italy. It argues that emperor worship was indeed perfectly in keeping with Roman religious tradition, which has been generally misunderstood by a posterity imbued in radically different notions of the relationship between man and the divine.
Caesar’s Divine Honours
Authors: Gradel Ittai
Published: November 2023

I have argued in my preceding chapter that, in terms of mental history, ruler cult was the traditional republican response to monarchy, whether the monarch was Jupiter or Caesar. The case of Julius Caesar illustrates and exemplifies many of the problems of ruler cult, as well as adding some of its own.
‘In Every House’? The Emperor 1n the Roman Household
Authors: Gradel Ittai
Published: November 2023

Private cult of the emperor, its form and its quantity, must be decisive for any general interpretation of emperor worship, especially so since scholars have usually claimed that the phenomenon was exclusively or overwhelmingly a public one, and from this conclusion have often questioned the ‘sincerity’ or ‘true religiosity’ of imperial cults.
Ideology and Taste: Narrative and Discourse in Petronius’ Satyricon
Authors: Laird Andrew
Published: November 2023

The study of Greek and Roman literature has long depended, with varying degrees of explicitness, on taste as a fundamental point of orientation. The very notion of ‘classics’ belongs to a connoisseurish rhetoric which canonizes certain texts, and attaches aesthetic properties to them. Multiculturalist critiques, in challenging the hegemony of the western tradition, have done something to unmask the frequently ‘Eurocentric’ nature of this aestheticization. At the same time, the study of Greek and Roman culture has also long depended on its illusory claim to objectivity. It is easy to believe that the ancient world can be safely detached from our own, and that our approach to it can therefore claim to be reasonably neutral.
Conclusions and Envoi: Representation and Responsibility
Authors: Laird Andrew
Published: November 2023

The conceptions of poetry and representation in Plato and Aristotle continue to influence speculations on the nature of discourse. However, the particular value Plato and his successors in antiquity attached to speech presentation has been largely ignored by modern theorists of language and literature. I have sought to respond to this oversight—to show that employment of various modes of direct and indirect discourse is by no means an isolated aspect of grammar or poetics, and to show that speech presentation has important epistemic, ethical and political dimensions.
Homer Beside Himself
Authors: Alden Maureen
Published: November 2023

Students reading the Iliad for the first time are often bewildered by the sheer volume of information on apparently unrelated subjects contained in it. The central narrative seems to unfold very slowly, and to be complicated by long speeches containing stories which might be interesting in themselves, but which seem to have no relevance to anything else. In this book Dr Alden offers advice on how to read the Iliad through the relationship of major paradigms to the events of the main narrative. The first section offers the first full-length study in English of the paradigmatic functions of secondary narratives and minor-key episodes in the Iliad. None of these are irrelevant or merely ornamental: rather each is carefully selected and altered if necessary, to reflect on significant episodes of the main narrative and act as guides to its interpretation. The second section offers a general reading of the Iliad arising out of Phoenix's advice to Achilles in Book 9. The allegory of the Prayers illustrates the dire consequences of rejecting prayers, and the paradigm of Meleager presents us with an instance of an angry hero to whom prayers and entreaties are addressed, whilst the primary narrative confines this motif of prayers and entreaties in ascending scale of affection to Achilles and Hector and contrasts their responses. Both heroes suffer terribly for their rejection of entreaties.
Introduction
Authors: Foxhall Lin
Published: November 2023

Columella (RR 5.8.1) called the olive ‘the first of all trees’, and then went on to praise its flexibility. The key point is that the tree can thrive when incorporated into many diverse agricultural and economic regimes. It can, and does, compose a major sector of many more agronomic systems than I have been able to document here. This study is centred upon the place of the olive in the agricultural regimes and economies of Classical, and to a much lesser extent, Archaic, Greece, between the sixth and third centuries bce. The cultivation of the olive offers the opportunity to explore the intricate relationships between social and cultural values, agricultural practices, the development and adoption of technology, and the workings of the economies of Classical Greece—aspects of the ancient world which are sometimes studied in isolation from each other.
Cultivating the Olive
Authors: Foxhall Lin
Published: November 2023

The Greeks knew that most fruit trees do not grow true to type from seed (Theophr. HP 2.2.5), and even if they did, it would take an uneconomically long time to grow productive trees in this manner. Olive trees, like other crop trees, could be propagated in a number of different ways. The main methods used for almost all fruit trees were cuttings (Xen. Oec. 19.12), layers and grafting (usually bud grafting rather than twig grafting though both were known and used, see Fig. 5.1). For olives there was the additional possibility of propagation by cutting of and planting the ovules which develop at the base of the stems of mature olive trees. The olive, says Theophrastos (HP 2.1.4), can be propagated in more ways than any other kind of tree.
Processing Olives
Authors: Foxhall Lin
Published: November 2023

It is much more difficult to give a complete account of Greek oil pressing than of Roman, and this is reflected in the secondary literature on the subject, which is heavily dependent upon the Roman evidence. Many scholars, beginning with Drachmann (1932) have explicitly or implicitly assumed that Greek techniques were similar to Roman ones, or that they were simply ‘less developed’ (Ault 1994a; Lohmann 1993: 213–15; Amouretti 1986: 167–75; White 1984: 67– 72; Frankel et al. 1994: 47–50). Often, scholars use Latin terminology for Greek pressing equipment which is not always exactly equivalent (Hadjisavvas 1992).
Introduction
Authors: Allan William
Published: November 2023

Francesca da Rimini’s words might well be applied to the experience of Andromache after the fall of Troy, shadowed by her happy past, and forced to endure the miserable and humiliating life of a slave and concubine in Greece. Euripides’ Andromache is a rich, moving tragedy which expands the story of the Trojan captive in new and interesting ways.
Myth
Authors: Allan William
Published: November 2023

One (still) very influential paradigm of Euripides’ relation to tragic myth runs as follows: encountering a fixed body of traditional heroic tales, he exposed their intellectual absurdity and hollow morality, and so heralded the end of tragedy as a viable form of mythical discourse.
Introduction: Philo of Larissa
Authors: Brittain Charles
Published: November 2023

Philo was the last sceptical leader of the Platonic Academy. The long tradition of Academic scepticism, initiated by Arcesilaos, confirmed by Carneades and Clitomachus, and inherited by Philo (scholarch from no to c.83 BC), was broken by his successor, Antiochus of Ascalon. Antiochus’ reformed ‘Old Academy’ was continued by his brother Aristus; thereafter we hear of no further scholarch, and it is probable that the Platonic school ceased to exist as an institution. After Philo’s death there were self-identified sceptical ‘Academics’ of considerable influence (among them, his student Cicero, and the ‘sophist’ Favorinus), but no enduring institution.
Philo’s Life
Authors: Brittain Charles
Published: November 2023

The philosophical remains of Philo are few, obscure in their contexts, and of controversial significance. In such circumstances, it is understandable that the evidence of his biography has been sought as a potential source for enlightenment. This chapter examines what is known (and what can be surmised) of Philo’s life, without undue prejudice concerning the relevance of the material conditions of the philosopher’s life to his thought. From the record of Philo’s teachers, pupils, and opponents it is perhaps possible to reconstruct a philosophical context within which his work is intelligible; the ultra-philosophical motivations and character of the man are facts of history which are neither readily accessible to us, nor, one might argue, explanatory of the philosophical history which survived them.
Epistemology: Philonian/Metrodorian Scepticism
Authors: Brittain Charles
Published: November 2023

Philo’s epistemological views evolved during the twenty-five years he was scholarch of the Academy. He was elected in i io bc as a supporter of the Clitomachian orthodoxy, a radical sceptic in the tradition of Arcesilaos and Carneades. By around 95 BC, some ten or fifteen years later, the ‘probabilism’ of the ‘Philonian/Metrodorian’ view had become, under his authority, the official line of the Academy. Then, in 88/7 bc, Philo produced the celebrated ‘Roman Books’, which, by recognizing a weak form of catalepsis, advocated a further modification of the Academic position. The radical discontinuities between the three ‘Academic’ positions were partially obscured by the form the innovations took: each view was represented in turn as the correct interpretation of Carneades’ philosophical stance. The institutional success of the first transition was overwhelming— the Philonian/Metrodorian reinterpretation of Academic history was generally accepted thereafter as a faithful record of the epistemological position of the entire tradition. In the Roman Books Philo was less successful: their historical assertions were criticized by both dogmatic and Academic contemporaries, and their philosophical life failed to survive his demise.
Epistemology: Philo’s Roman Books
Authors: Brittain Charles
Published: November 2023

In the Roman Books, I will argue, Philo sought to modify Academic scepticism by advocating a novel conception of knowledge. He argued that the Stoic definition of catalepsis, which had dominated Hellenistic (and in particular Philonian/ Metrodorian) epistemology, was mistaken: by taking cataleptic impressions to be of such a kind that they could not be false, the Stoics imposed a condition on catalepsis which could not be met. A correct understanding of the notion of catalepsis, however, would make it clear that the acquisition of knowledge was possible. The ‘fallibilist’ definition of catalepsis in the Roman Books was proposed as the correct description of such knowledge as is in fact attained in certain areas of our experience.
The Unity of the Academy: Philo’s Roman Books and Prior Academic Views
Authors: Brittain Charles
Published: November 2023

Philo asserted the unity of the Academy, claiming that the position he held in the Roman Books was, at least substantially, the view of all the Academics from Plato onwards (cf. Ac. i. 13). This claim was met with anger by Antiochus, and astonishment and denial by Philo’s fellow Academics (Ac. 2. 11-12). I have proposed an interpretation of the history of the Academy which is compatible with the epistemology of the Roman Books, and broadly consonant with Philo’s career as an Academic.1 On this interpretation, Philo argued that while the Academy had never accepted the Stoic conception of knowledge, it had always believed that (non-Stoic) catalepsis was attainable in restricted areas. Plato, Arcesilaos, and Carneades had accepted perception and normal cognition as fallible but reliable.
Tragedy and Collective Experience
Authors: Gould John
Published: November 2023

My subject in this paper is the tragic chorus. I shall concentrate, in particular, on the contribution that the chorus makes, through its fictive identity and the development of that identity into a dramatic role, to the construction of tragic meaning. In doing so I shall try to bring into focus an issue that I believe has been causing problems in a number of the topics discussed in these papers, namely the fictionality of tragedy and of its chorus, and to point to some important consequences of that fictionality.
The Discovery of Celtic Italy
Authors: Williams J H C
Published: November 2023

Geography and ethnography always played an important role in the historiographical traditions of the Greco-Roman world. Hecataeus and Herodotus were not just the fathers of history. Greek historians showed an abiding interest in the customs of foreign peoples and places. In the Hellenistic period, the scope and character of this interest developed in two ways through the opening up of new fields of inquiry in the wake of the conquests of Alexander and the establishment of the successor kingdoms across Asia, and with the intellectual elaboration of new theories to explain the apparent variety in human cultures. Largely because of the geographical direction of Greek conquest, scientific inquiry was also oriented primarily towards the peoples and cultures of what to Greek observers constituted the East and the South, in particular the Persians, Indians, and Egyptians. By contrast, the peoples and regions of the North and the West received less attention. Consequently, the Celts were relatively unknown when, having invaded Greece from the north in the early third century BC, they began to impinge unexpectedly and rather more immediately on the Greek consciousness than they had before. This wasa position that would change over the course of the third century.
Myth and History II: The Sack of Rome
Authors: Williams J H C
Published: November 2023

The sack of Rome by the Gauls was an event of cardinal importance in the Romans ‘ perspective on history. It orientated their relationship with their past, both chronologically and emotionally. For Polybius, it was the starting point for the Romans ‘ rise to world dominance: because, as he says, from that time on they had won a continuous succession of victories over their enemies in the Italian peninsula and the Mediterranean.1 For Livy the recovery of Rome from the disaster of the sack was like the rebirth of the city, a refoundation to a greater future of conquest and glory, and as a date it was, like the city ‘s first foundation, a milestone from which later years could be reckoned.2 In Livy the sack represents the return of Rome to its starting point, to the beginning of the city itself, from which the Romans set out once more to conquer, with the determination never to suffer the same fate again. The sack was, in a sense, the start of modern Roman history for the authors of the late Republic, for thereafter their sources were obviously fuller and more reliable.
Philosophy and Literature in Lucretian Intertextuality
Authors: Fowler Don
Published: November 2023

The celebrated opposition between philosophy and poetry in the De rerum natura can to an extent be rephrased in terms of an opposition between the differing reading practices of two interpretative communities. The features that we find in the work are determined not by its supposed intrinsic nature, but by what we look for in it. The frontier between the ‘philosophical’ and ‘literary’ traditions is not itself, of course, timeless, and how close or distant they are from each other will depend on the nature of the philosophical or literary-critical positions adopted by readers as well as on the general intellectual climate.
The Ruin of Time: Monuments and Survival at Rome
Authors: Fowler Don
Published: November 2023

IN one of his epigrams, the fourth-century-CE French poet Ausonius describes an inscription which has lost some of its letters: Lucius una quidem, geminis sed dissita punctis littera: praenomen sic nota sola facit. post M incisum est: puto sic non tota videtur; dissiluit saxi fragmine laesus apex. nee quisquam, Marius, seu Marcius, anne Metellus hie iaceat, certis noverit indiciis. truncatis convulsa iacent elementa figuris, omnia confusis interiere notis. miremur periisse homines? monumenta fatiscunt, mors etiam saxis nominibusque venit. ‘Lucius’ is one letter, but it is separated by twin points: in this way a single sign indicates the (entire) praenomen. After an ‘M’ is inscribed, at least I think so-it is not all visible.
Jean Froissart and the Fabric Of History
Authors: Ainsworth Peter F
Published: November 2023

Why do Froissart's Chroniques still find enthusiastic readers six hundred years after they were written? In this fresh reading Peter Ainsworth shows that their strength lies as much in their textual richness and complexity as in their appealing subject matter: the exploits of French and English noblemen during the Hundred Years War. A record of international chivalry that pretends to the title of `history', the Chroniques are in fact neither history nor romance, though they partake a little of both and are still valued by scholars as a historical source. Rather they constitute a variegated and enthralling narrative of vast proportions, veering from the historical to the outrageously fictional, from the journalistic travelogue to the moral tale, from self-effacement in the service of impartiality to unshamed self-celebration.
Introduction: The Image of the Romantic Poet
Authors: Paley Morton D
Published: November 2023

ON 10-11 May 1817 John Keats wrote to his friend the artist Benjamin Robert Haydon: When in the Isle of W ight I met with a Shakespeare in the Passage of the House at which I lodged-it comes nearer to my idea of him than any I have seen. —1was but there a Week yet the old Woman made me take it with me though I went off in a hurry—Do you not think this is ominous of good? Keats has recontextualized and internalized the image of Shakespeare in the engraving—probably after the Chandos portrait—so that it becomes an icon of his own poetic destiny, a ‘good genius’ or ‘Presider’, as he puts it in the same letter. Here we see one of the roles the portrait of a poet can assume for the Romantic imagination. Of course it can have far more ordinary functions. ‘When you look upon a portrait,’ wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘you must not compare it with the face when present, but with the recollection of the face. It refers not so much to the senses, as to the ideal sense of the friend not present.’ In such a role, the portrait of a poet functions for its contemporary viewers much as any other portrait of a friend or loved one.
In Praise of Scribes
Authors: Beal Peter
Published: November 2023

In Praise of Scribes is a major contribution to the field of manuscript studies in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This profusely illustrated book argues for the significant role played by clerks and scriveners both in contemporary society and in the transmissional history of literary texts. Specific case studies are offered of a remarkably industrious contributor to the ferment of ideas leading to the Civil War (the so-called 'Feathery Scribe'), as well as of the notorious 'Captain' Robert Julian in the Restoration period. Other case studies exemplify the wide-ranging empirical use which is to be made of material texts, and shed new light on works by Sir Philip Sidney, John Donne, and Katherine Philips, writers who flourished in a manuscript culture. The book explores questions about the nature of that culture vis à vis print culture, about constructions of authorship, and about the complex nature of texts themselves in an evolving society and changing readership.
‘It shall not therefore kill itself; that is, not bury itself’:Donne’s Biathanatos and its text
Authors: Beal Peter
Published: November 2023

IN a well-known, often-quoted letter of 1619, John Donne entrusted a manuscript to Sir Robert Ker, later Earl of Ancrum (1578-1654). He declared: ‘I only forbid it the Presse, and the Fire: publish it not, but yet burn it not; and between those, do what you will with it.’1 This has been regarded as one of Donne’s key statements about his own texts. Indeed it has been seen as encapsulating Donne’s whole attitude towards his unpublished works in general-as showing, in effect, his wholehearted support of the coterie manuscript culture to which they belonged.2 This may be so. Nevertheless, I think we must also recognize that Donne is applying very specific instructions to one very specific work: Biathanatos, his huge, elaborately argued, copiously documented treatise on suicide, or self-homicide, as he calls it. This is his first major prose discourse, so far as we know, and, with the sole exception of the 430-page Pseudo-Martyr which followed shortly afterwards (1610), it is by far the longest single work in the Donne canon.
‘Hoping they shall only come to your merciful eyes’: Sidney’s Letter to Queen Elizabeth and its transmission
Authors: Beal Peter
Published: November 2023

During the course of the year 1579 one of the crucial episodes in the life of Queen Elizabeth I came to a head. This was the proposal that she should marry Frarn;:ois, Due d’ Alern;:on (who was by now also Due d’ Anjou), brother of Henri III of France. He was the Frenchman she affectionately called her ‘little frog’, and who may be the one immortalized in the nursery rhyme ‘A frog he would a-wooing go’.1 The proposal, first mooted in 1572, had been rumbling along for seven years; but negotiations took a significant new turn in 1579 when Alern;:on’s agent, Jean de Simier, was sent over to plead his cause to the Queen with more than customary ardour and eloquence; when the 46-year-old Virgin Queen gave unexpected indications that she was at last taking him seriously, even consulting physicians for advice on whether a woman of her age could still safely bear children; and when her Council realized, with alarm, if not horror, that the next heir to the English throne might well be a Frenchman and a Papist.2 As we know., the scheme eventually evaporated.
‘The virtuous Mrs Philips’ and ‘that whore Castlemaine’: Orinda and her apotheosis, 1664-1668
Authors: Beal Peter
Published: November 2023

I mean Katherine Philips, the ‘Matchless Orinda’, who, in the 1650s and 1660s, occupied the centre of a genteel literary coterie of both women and men, her so-called ‘Society of Friendship’, and who engaged in the writing, copying, and disseminating of manuscripts of her own works, in England, Wales, and Ireland, during the greater part of her short life. A ‘scribe’ in the narrow sense she may not have been, but a ‘maker of manuscripts’ she certainly was.
States of Siege.” Violence, Place, Gender: Paris around r400
Authors: Solterer Helen
Published: November 2023

By turning in circles the displaced preserve their identity and improvise a shelter. Built of what? Of habits, of the raw material of repetition. Home is no longer a dwelling but the untold story of a life being lived ... To begin: two commonplaces about late medieval European culture, or two scenes exemplifying what one Parisian writer called ‘the exercise of living’.
The Trouble with Harold: The Ideological Context of the Vita Haroldi
Authors: Stein Robert M
Published: November 2023

The death of Harold Godwinson, the famously last Anglo-Saxon king defeated by William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings, was the subject of a very wide variety of contemporary representations. Best known, of course, is the illustration in the Bayeux Tapestry showing Harold killed by an arrow to the eye. As historical pictures tend to do, whatever their actual degree of visual representational skills, the Bayeux Tapestry presents itself as a simple and unmediated representation of reality: Harold is depicted with an arrow in his eye because, the tapestry seems to say to us, he was shot in the eye by an arrow. Let us, however, remind ourselves, as a way of beginning, that modes of representation, including conscious and unconscious decisions about what to represent and what to gloss over, are always driven by a variety of considerations and that blinding, for example, was a frequent punishment for a variety of crimes from theft to multiple arrest. Harold may well be depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry with an arrow in his eye because it is a legible sign of the justice of his defeat at Hastings rather than because it is what ‘actually happened to him’ on the battlefield.
Bill-Casting and Political Discourse in Late Medieval England
Authors: Sease Wendy
Published: November 2023

In the course of an account of Jack Cade’s rebellion of 1450, a contemporary London chronicler (probably William Gregory, mayor of London) recorded that certain mysterious writings had been posted up on doors around the city: Gregory’s account does not, unfortunately, tell us what seemed so ‘strange and wonderfol’ about the bills, but it does indicate very clearly that the fact that they were displayed on city doors was at least as remarkable as their content. That Gregory thought fit to notice them in his chronicle is one small register of their success.
Analytical Survey 2: We are Not Alone: Psychoanalytic Medievalism
Authors: Fradenburg Louise O
Published: November 2023

IT is no easy matter to decide which medievalist works are ‘psycho analytic’ and which are not. The terms and figures of psychoanalysis have profoundly penetrated contemporary thought and practice; psycho analysis is ‘in session’ in contemporary culture, as Laurence Rickels has put it; and as Foucault’s The Hiswry of Sexuality proposes, psycho analysis is part of a long history of ‘subjectivation’, a history which Eugene Vance has noted includes the ‘theological discourse that emerged in the fourth century’. In a paper delivered at the Medieval Institute Conference at Kalamazoo in 1994, Elizabeth Scala argued that the work of Lee Patterson is saturated with conceptions of the subject and of repetition that owe much of their current resonance to the psychoanalytic methods he explicitly repudiates.
The Bible And Its Rewritings
Authors: Boitani Piero
Published: November 2023

Piero Boitani discusses how some of the most fascinating scenes of Old and New Testament -- Genesis, Exodus, Job, the Susanna story, the Gospel of John -- are directly or indirectly rewritten in works ranging from the medieval period to the late twentieth-century: by Milton and Mann; by Chaucer, Dryden, La Fontaine, Orwell, and Kafka; by Faulkner and Tournier; by Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, and Joseph Roth. Literature resonates with the mystery of recognition between human beings, and between God and humankind. The opening and closing chapters of the book examine this theme: from Abraham and Yahweh at Mamre to Joseph and his brothers, from Helen and Menelaus to Jesus and Mary Magdalene, from Pericles and Marina to Mendel Singer and his son Menuchim. The three central sections of the book discuss the means by which re-scripturing interprets the Scriptures: through truth or fiction; through letter or allegory; through liturgy, exegesis, catacomb frescoes, even churches themselves. This is an illuminating look at the Bible and its medieval and modern rewritings.
From J to M Recognizing and Rewriting God
Authors: Boitani Piero
Published: November 2023

As Abraham is sitting in the plains at Mamre, at the entrance to his tent, in the heat of the day, God appears. This is not the first time it has happened to him: God has always appeared directly on the scene, from the very beginning of his vicissitudes, when he was commanded to leave his home in Ur of the Chaldees for an unknown land, and his words later come to him ‘in a vision’ to confirm his promise, covenant, and blessing.
Only a Foreigner Would Do: Leopold Bloom, Ireland, and Jews
Authors: Gibson Andrew
Published: November 2023

Critical accounts of the Jewish theme in Ulysses have often not been sufficiently historically specific. Alternatively, they have been so in one way but not another: precise about Jews and anti-Semitism in the modern Europe in which Joyce composed his novel, much less exact about the same subjects in the Ireland in which Joyce grew up, the Ireland of Ulysses. Neil Davison and, above all, Dermot Keogh have recently started to redress the balance.1 But even Keogh’s reading of Ulysses veers away from the implications of the historical material he provides.
Pope, Print and Meaning
Authors: McLaverty James
Published: November 2023

Throughout his life, Pope was fascinated by print. He loved its elements: dropped heads, italics, small capitals; fine paper and good ink; headpieces, tailpieces, initials, and plates. And he loved playing games with publication: anonymity, pseudonymity, false imprints, fake title-pages, advertisements, special editions, and variant texts. This is the first study to take Pope's experiments in print as a guide to interpretation. Each chapter is devoted to a particular book or text and focuses on how Pope expresses meaning through print. The Rape of the Lock, Dunciad Variorum, Essay on Man, early imitations of Horace, and Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot are read through their illustrations, annotations, parallel texts, title-pages, and revisions. Independent chapters are devoted to Pope's Works of 1717 and 1735-6, discussing his self-presentation and his relation to his readers. He emerges from the study as a figure marginalized socially, politically, and sexually, an author who gambles with his private life in confronting his opponents.
Introduction
Authors: McLaverty James
Published: November 2023

Pope was fascinated by print throughout his life. In his youth he penned manuscript pages that looked like print; in early manhood he designed elaborate editions of the Iliad and Odyssey; and in middle age he ran his own printing and publishing business by proxy. Print was for him both a serious vocation and an elaborate game. This study approaches Pope’s major poems through their printing and publication, each chapter being stimulated by some new edition, elaboration of apparatus, or detail of typography. Although interpretation sometimes ranges widely in search of an explanation that will satisfy an initial curiosity, the materiality of the texts is always kept in mind and the discussion informed by Pope’s printing practice. The thesis of this book is that, in reading Pope, print matters.
The Works of 1717: Building a Monument
Authors: McLaverty James
Published: November 2023

In many ways the Works of Mr Alexander Pope, published on 3June 1717, dignified, decorated, and expensive, is the boldest as well as the most beautiful of Pope’s books, proclaiming both the poet’s youth and his achievement with a confident flourish. The Works gave Pope the status of a classic author, opened up new opportunities for authorial control and self-definition, and set a pattern of publication that persisted until his death. But in June 1717 Pope had only just passed his twenty-ninth birthday, and in publishing a volume of Works he was engaging in an act of self-promotion that any celebrated 79-year-old contemporary would have blenched at. It is true that his action was not altogether unprecedented. In 1616 Ben Jonson had taken a similar step, publishing The Workes of Beniamin Jonson in folio, with a monumental title page and with his plays presented in the manner of the ‘earliest editions of Plautus, Terence, and Aristophanes’.
The Dunciad Variorum: The Limits of Dialogue
Authors: McLaverty James
Published: November 2023

The Dunciad Variorum, first published in early April 1729, has self-evident claims to be a great polyphonic text. The title itself proclaims a plurality: ‘The Dunciad, Variorum. With the Prolegomena of Scriblerus.’ Variorum abbreviates ‘editio cum notis variorum’, an edition with the notes of various commentators, and the name of the chief commentator, Martinus Scriblerus, appears on the title page, whereas that of the author does not. The book is so complex and various that it contains not one list of contents but two. An idea of its scope, but not of its appearance, with each page accompanied by a great crypt of footnotes (see Fig. 6), is conveyed by reprinting the contents lists.
Other Dickens
Authors: Bowen John
Published: November 2023

In the first half of his career, Dickens wrote some of the most important novels of the nineteenth century, including The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and Martin Chuzzlewit. They are exorbitant and transgressive books, with an inventive comic force unprecedented in the English novel. In this, the first full-length study for thirty years, John Bowen blends contemporary theory and historical awareness to argue that they are radical in both political and fictional terms. With a tactful use of contemporary critical theory, he shows how their often uncanny power disturbs and transforms our ways of understanding Dickens's work and his place in the history of the novel.
Adjestin’ the Differences:
Authors: Bowen John
Published: November 2023

Flaubert’s remarks show what a trouble Pickwick Papers can be to readers and critics, and to both formally and historically oriented methods of analysis. It seems hard to think of a method or theory that could do justice both to the novel’s success and to the apparent ‘incoherences’ and ‘improvisations’ that are such a marked feature of the text. Take for example the incident in the first chapter of the book in which Mr Blotton calls
Performing Business, Training Ghosts: Nicholas Nickleby
Authors: Bowen John
Published: November 2023

My mother, who was also left to me when my father died (I never had anything left to me but relations), is in the strangest state of mind from senile decay: and the impossibility of getting her to understand what is the matter, combined with her desire to be got up in sables like a female Hamlet, illumines the dreary scene with a ghastly absurdity that is the chief relief I can find in it.
The Genealogy of Monsters: Martin Chuzzlewit
Authors: Bowen John
Published: November 2023

Martin Chuzzlewit is the strangest, most demanding, and funniest of Dickens’s earlier fictions, and one of the most important of all nineteenth-century novels. The title-page emphatically tells us that the book is going to be about families and inheritance: ‘The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, his relatives, friends and enemies ... showing, moreover, who inherited the family plate, who came in for the silver spoons, and who for the wooden ladles. The whole forming a complete key to the House of Chuzzlewit.’1
Stabs at Fiction: 1867-1871
Authors: Sutherland John
Published: November 2023

IN her eagerness to be a scholar Mary Arnold had not entirely relinquished that earlier ambition to be a novelist. But fiction was something always associated in her mind with leisure and slack moments. Her first two years at Oxford had been too hectic and full for the luxury of day-dreaming on paper. But in the long vacation of 1869 she found herself again at a loose end. The Pattisons were evidently away. On Sunday 20 June, more in a spirit of doodling than anything, she began a diary (something else that she was normally too busy for). Restless boredom is the keynote.
Fighting Back: 1878-1880
Authors: Sutherland John
Published: November 2023

THE WARDS’ first eight years at Oxford had ended, if not in defeat, then certainly at a distressingly low ebb. Most couples would now have settled for less from life. A modestly comfortable, if undistinguished, existence was still open to them. One did not have to be first class to inhabit Oxford’s middle firmament. Humphry could cut back on his teaching, do a bit more journalism, a bit more shooting and fishing, and generally enjoy life more. Mary Ward could potter at her committees and play at some genteel research project. The children would grow up and they would manage somehow. There were rich relatives (notably the Forsters) who had a soft spot for them.
Elsmere Mania: 1888
Authors: Sutherland John
Published: November 2023

THE critical reception of Robert Elsmere falls into a number of phases. First, and most disconcerting, was silence. Newspaper and weekly reviews came extraordinarily late. Robert Elsmere was published on 24 February 1888 with the usual trade releases and advertisement. At this period of British journalism same-day reviews were routine for important novels.
Families—the Wards: 1890-1900
Authors: Sutherland John
Published: November 2023

AFTER 1888, Mary was de facto head of the Humphry Ward family: the main provider and the main decision maker. Her rule was a judicious mixture of edict (especially where 'appearances’ were concerned); joint edict with Humphry (particularly on financial matters); and passive manipulation (she was, for instance, expert in the use of her invalidism to control the domestic environment). On the whole, Mary ran the Wards’ affairs fairly and wisely.
Best-Selling Novelist, Failed Dramatist: 1901-1905
Authors: Sutherland John
Published: November 2023

IN the wake of Eleanor's success, Mary Ward was induced to move quickly on to a follow-up novel. Despite Reginald Smith’s suspicions that his American partner was not financially sound, Harper’s was again chosen for the unwritten new novel. The terms (finalized in February 1901) reflected Harper’s warm feelings about Eleanor. The author would again get £2,400 for the American serialization, which would run from May 1902 to April 1903.
Family Matters: 1900-1905
Authors: Sutherland John
Published: November 2023

THE first years of the twentieth century were golden for families like the Wards. Their income was large—between £6,000 and £8,000 a year—and it went a long way. Domestic service was still cheap and abundant. Dorothy Ward, for instance, interviewed at least nine cooks before finding one she liked for Grosvenor Place in 1903. Kitchen maids, upstairs maids, laundry maids, serving maids could be had for £30 to £100 a year plus board.
The Testing of Diana Mallory: 1907
Authors: Sutherland John
Published: November 2023

THE New Year of 1907 began at a gallop. By 2 January, Mary Ward had the first chapter of Diana Mallory off to Smith, Elder’s manager (the loyal Aitchison—now celebrating his fiftieth year with Smith, Elder). She was her own woman again. On the advice of Curtis Brown—not yet her agent but her ‘adviser’—she suggested to Reginald Smith that her old copyrights were still not fully exploited.
Anti-Suffragist: 1909
Authors: Sutherland John
Published: November 2023

CHRISTMAS 1908 and the New Year 1909 were gloomy; the Huxleys—still mourning Julia's death—spent the holidays at Stocks. From now until her death, Mary Ward was to be a particularly fond aunt to the three mother¬less boys Aldous (Dorothy’s favourite), Julian (Mary’s favourite), and Trev. January itself promised to be busy. Mrs Ward’s Women’s League to oppose suffrage had taken off and a full programme of lectures and debates had been arranged by the executive, of which she was the main strategist. Arnold Ward was now a dutifully convinced anti-suffragist (when the Men’s League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage was formed on 19 January he was prominent among its officers).
The Wards and War: 1914-1916
Authors: Sutherland John
Published: November 2023

LIKE other unhappy families, the Wards found world war to be something of a relief. Cataclysmic worry about the end of civilization took their minds off their own problems. Their concerns about money seemed positively petty as the Boche hordes swept over Belgium. And a number of painful decisions were mercifully postponed. There was now no question of selling Stocks— the bottom had dropped out of the property market and they would not get a fair price for it. Instead they made arrangements to let the house.
“What’s Past is Prologue’
Authors: Stafford Fiona
Published: November 2023

‘Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end: then stop.’1 It wouldn’t really matter what the task in hand might be-as an instruction on how to proceed, this could hardly be clearer. The words are simple, the sequence straightforward, and the action, complete. And yet, as every reader of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland knows, this advice is given in the face of misunderstanding and general mayhem. Words which, when taken out of context, seem entirely lucid, become charged with vexation and difficulty when restored to their original setting in the surreal courtroom drama where the search for any truth, let alone the whole, seems forlorn and faintly absurd. To ask another witness to ‘begin’ risks reopening the kind of con¬ fusion that had beset the Mad Hatter, as his attempt to recount an adventure that ‘began with tea’ turned instantly into an exchange about words beginning with ‘T’. The question of what things begin with (other than ‘T’) is far from simple, and so the King of Hearts’ request that the White Rabbit should ‘begin at the beginning’ is not easily obeyed.