The twenty-eight essays in this Handbook represent the best of current thinking in the study of Latin language and literature in the Middle Ages. The insights offered by the collective of authors not only illuminate the field of medieval Latin literature but shed new light on broader questions of literary history, cultural interaction, world literature, and language in history and society. The contributors to this volume--a collection of both senior scholars and gifted young thinkers--vividly illustrate the field's complexities on a wide range of topics through carefully chosen examples and challenges to settled answers of the past. At the same time, they suggest future possibilities for the necessarily provisional and open-ended work essential to the pursuit of medieval Latin studies. While advanced specialists will find much here to engage and at times to provoke them, this handbook successfully orients non-specialists and students to this thriving field of study. The overall approach of The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Latin Literature makes this volume an essential resource for students of the ancient world interested in the prolonged after-life of the classical period's cultural complexes, for medieval historians, for scholars of other medieval literary traditions, and for all those interested in delving more deeply into the fascinating more-than-millennium that forms the bridge between the ancient Mediterranean world and what we consider modernity.

Dag Norberg's analysis and interpretation of Medieval Latin versification, which was published in French in 1958 and remains the standard work on the subject, appears here for the first time in English with a detailed, scholarly introduction by Jan Ziolkowski that reviews the developments of the past fifty years.

The first mention of Christian Latin hymns by a known author occurs in the writings of St. Jerome who states that Hilary, Bishop of Poitiers (c. 310-366), a noted author of commentaries and theological works, wrote a Liber Hymnorum. This collection has never been recovered in its entirety. Hilary’s priority as a hymn writer is attested by Isidore of Seville (d. 636) who says: Hilary, however, Bishop of Poitiers in Gaul, a man of unusual eloquence, was the first prominent hymn writer. More important than his prior claim is the motive which actuated him, the defense of the Trinitarian doctrine, to which he was aroused by his controversy with the Arians. A period of four years as an exile in Phrygia for which his theological opponents were responsible, made him familiar with the use of hymns in the oriental church to promote the Arian heresy. Hilary wrested a sword, so to speak, from his adversaries and carried to the west the hymn, now a weapon of the orthodox. His authentic extant hymns, three in number, must have been a part of the Liber Hymnorum. Ante saecula qui manens, “O Thou who dost exist before time,” is a hymn of seventy verses in honor of the Trinity; Fefellit saevam verbum factum te, caro, “The Incarnate Word hath deceived thee (Death)” is an Easter hymn; and Adae carnis gloriosae, “In the person of the Heavenly Adam” is a hymn on the theme of the temptation of Jesus. They are ponderous in style and expression and perhaps too lengthy for congregational use since they were destined to be superseded. In addition to these the hymn Hymnum dicat turba fratrum, “Let your hymn be sung, ye faithful,” has been most persistently associated with Hilary’s name. The earliest text occurs in a seventh century manuscript. It is a metrical version of the life of Jesus in seventy-four lines, written in the same meter as that of Adae carnis gloriosae.

The concept of Purgatory in Middle English didactic writings is explored through examination of visions of the afterlife, sermons, homiletic treatises, and lyrics.

In applying the standards of modern literary criticism to medieval Arabic literature, Andras Hamori concentrates on those aspects of the literature that appear most alien to modern Western taste: the limitation of themes, the sedimentation with conventions, and the use of elusive patterns of composition. The first part of the book approaches Arabic literature from the historical point of view, concentrating on the transformations in poetic genres and poetic attitudes towards time and society in the literature between the sixth and the tenth centuries. The problems of poetic technique are then discussed, with special emphasis on poetic unity and the use of conventions. The third part of the book deals with methods of composition in prose through an examination of the orders and disorders in two tales from the Arabian Nights. Originally published in 1974. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

More than fifty specialists have contributed to this new edition of volume 1 of The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. The design of the original work has established itself so firmly as a workable solution to the immense problems of analysis, articulation and coordination that it has been retained in all its essentials for the new edition. The task of the new contributors has been to revise and integrate the lists of 1940 and 1957, to add materials of the following decade, to correct and refine the bibliographical details already available, and to re-shape the whole according to a new series of conventions devised to give greater clarity and consistency to the entries.

Chronicles the French revolution, from the gathering of the Estates-General, after one-hundred-twenty-five years of silence, to disunity within the Committee of Public Safety, The fall of Robespierre, and the end of the Reign of Terror.

A vivid portrait of political and cultural life in the 10th century