Search results for ""author jan m. ziolkowski""

The Cambridge Songs, from the Latin Carmina Cantabrigiensia, is the most important anthology of songs from before the thirteenth-century Carmina Burana. It offers the only major surviving anthology of Latin lyric poems from between Charlemagne and the Battle of Hastings. It contains panegyrics and dirges, political poems, comic tales, religious and didactic poems, and poetry of spring and love. Was it a school book for students, or a songbook for the use of professional entertainers? The greatest certainty is that the poems were composed in the learned language, and that they were associated with song. The collection is like the contents of an eleventh-century jukebox or playlist of top hits from more than three centuries.This edition and translation comprises a substantial introduction, the Latin texts and English prose in carefully matched presentation, and extensive commentary, along with appendices, list of works cited, and indices.

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Solomon and Marcolf is known for being both important and mysterious. It pits wise Solomon, famous from the Bible, against a wily peasant named Marcolf. One of its two parts is a dialogue, in which the king and jester, sage and fool, prophet and blasphemer bandy back and forth questions and comments. Whereas Solomon is solemn and pompous, Marcolf resorts to low language and earthy topics. The other part comprises twenty short chapters in which Marcolf tricks Solomon time and again. These episodes are as impudent and scatological as is the dialogue. Together, the two parts constitute a rudimental prose novel or “rogue biography.”Cited by Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World, Solomon and Marcolf is widely known by name. But until now it has not been translated into any modern language. The present volume offers an introduction, followed by the Latin and English, detailed commentary, and reproductions of woodcut illustrations from the 1514 edition. Appendixes help readers understand the origins and influence of a work that was composed around 1200, that attained its greatest popularity in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and that has the potential still today to delight and instruct.

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Dante put Muhammad in one of the lowest circles of Hell. At the same time, the medieval Christian poet placed several Islamic philosophers much more honorably in Limbo. Furthermore, it has long been suggested that for much of the basic framework of the Divine Comedy Dante was indebted to apocryphal traditions about a “night journey” taken by Muhammad. Dante scholars have increasingly returned to the question of Islam to explore the often surprising encounters among religious traditions that the Middle Ages afforded. This collection of essays works through what was known of the Qur’an and of Islamic philosophy and science in Dante’s day and explores the bases for Dante’s images of Muhammad and Ali. It further compels us to look at key instances of engagement among Muslims, Jews, and Christians.

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Solomon and Marcolf is known for being both important and mysterious. It pits wise Solomon, famous from the Bible, against a wily peasant named Marcolf. One of its two parts is a dialogue, in which the king and jester, sage and fool, prophet and blasphemer bandy back and forth questions and comments. Whereas Solomon is solemn and pompous, Marcolf resorts to low language and earthy topics. The other part comprises twenty short chapters in which Marcolf tricks Solomon time and again. These episodes are as impudent and scatological as is the dialogue. Together, the two parts constitute a rudimental prose novel or “rogue biography.”Cited by Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World, Solomon and Marcolf is widely known by name. But until now it has not been translated into any modern language. The present volume offers an introduction, followed by the Latin and English, detailed commentary, and reproductions of woodcut illustrations from the 1514 edition. Appendixes help readers understand the origins and influence of a work that was composed around 1200, that attained its greatest popularity in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and that has the potential still today to delight and instruct.

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This volume includes: Olga Levaniouk, “The Dreams of Barčin and Penelope”; Paul K. Hosle, “Bacchylides’ Theseus and Vergil’s Aristaeus”; Vayos Liapis, “Arion and the Dolphin: Apollo Delphinios and Maritime Networks in Herodotus”; Nino Luraghi, “The Peloponnesian Peace: Herodotus, Thucydides, and the Ideology of the Peace of Nikias”; Andrea Capra, “The Staging and Meaning of Aristophanes’ Assemblywomen”; Konstantine Panegyres, “Moses, Pharaoh, and the Waters of the Nile: Artapanus FGrHist 726 F 3”; Roy D. Kotansky, “Underworld and Celestial Eschatologies in the ‘Orphic’ Gold Leaves”; Vittorio Remo Danovi, “New Citations from the Libri Etruscorum and Varro in Vergilian Scholia”; T. H. M. Gellar-Goad, “Tears and Personified Nature in Juvenal 15.131–140 and Lucretius 3.931–962”; Tristan Power, “Textual Conjectures on Catullus 55.9-12”; Francesco Rotiroti, “From Beneficent God to Maddened Bull: The Shepherd of Men in the Works of Virgil”; J. S. C. Eidinow, “The Critic and the Farmer: Horace, Maecenas, and Virgil in Horace Carm. 1.1”; Shirley Werner, “The Rules of the Game: Imitation and Mimesis in Horace Epistles 1.19”; Francis Newton, “Ovid Met. 1: Jupiter’s Plebeians, the Titles of Augustus, and the Poet’s Exile”; Simona Martorana, “Omission and Allusion: When Statius’ Hypsipyle Reads Ovid’s Heroides 6”; Michael Zellmann-Rohrer, “The Chronokratores in Greek Astrology, in Light of a New Papyrus Text: Oxford, Bodl. MS Gr. Class. B 24 (P) 1–2”; Konstantine Panegyres, “ΒΟΜΒΟΣ: Heliodorus Aethiopica 9.17.1”; Andrew C. Johnston, “Aemilius and the Crown: Rome and the Hellenistic World of the Alexander Romance.”

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In antiquity and the Middle Ages, memory was a craft, and certain actions and tools were thought to be necessary for its creation and recollection. Until now, however, many of the most important visual and textual sources on the topic have remained untranslated or otherwise difficult to consult. Mary Carruthers and Jan M. Ziolkowski bring together the texts and visual images from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries that are central to an understanding of memory and memory technique. These sources are now made available for a wider audience of students of medieval and early modern history and culture and readers with an interest in memory, mnemonics, and the synergy of text and image. The art of memory was most importantly associated in the Middle Ages with composition, and those who practiced the craft used it to make new prayers, sermons, pictures, and music. The mixing of visual and verbal media was commonplace throughout medieval cultures: pictures contained visual puns, words were often verbal paintings, and both were used equally as tools for making thoughts. The ability to create pictures in one's own mind was essential to medieval cognitive technique and imagination, and the intensely pictorial and affective qualities of medieval art and literature were generative, creative devices in themselves.

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Solomon and Marcolf: Vernacular Traditions offers an array of relevant texts, in English for the first time, that display the mysteries of the “rogue biography” that is Solomon and Marcolf. The astonishingly varied and fascinating pieces have been translated from medieval and early modern French, Russian, German, Icelandic, Danish, and Italian.

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This book brings into print editions, translations, and commentaries for more than two dozen unique poems (in Latin) from the late eleventh and early twelfth century, preserved in Houghton Library's anthology known as MS Lat 300. This book offers unparalleled access to the anthology, previously unavailable in English.From a literary point of view, those interested in lyric poetry composed in Old French and Old Provençal have paid increasing attention to Latin poetry that circulated in France, and of course those wishing to trace the background of the Carmina Burana have reason to study this kind of collection, but many poems remain unedited and even more cry out for translation and contextualization. With the publication of the accompanying facsimiles, palaeographers may now be able to solve the puzzle of where the manuscript originated--its story between the Napoleonic wars and 1965, when it was purchased by Harvard. All told, this volume opens the way to advances in medieval studies.

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Solomon and Marcolf: Vernacular Traditions offers an array of relevant texts, in English for the first time, that display the mysteries of the “rogue biography” that is Solomon and Marcolf. The astonishingly varied and fascinating pieces have been translated from medieval and early modern French, Russian, German, Icelandic, Danish, and Italian.

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The first English translation of the earliest Latin poems about miracles performed by the Virgin Mary, composed in twelfth-century Canterbury by a Benedictine monk who inspired Chaucer.Nigel (ca. 1135–1198), a Benedictine monk at Christ Church in Canterbury, is best known for The Mirror of Fools—a popular satire whose hero Burnellus the Ass is referenced in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Nigel’s oeuvre also includes other important poems and hagiography.The Miracles of the Virgin is the oldest Latin poem about miracles performed by Mary. This collection features seventeen lively tales in which the Virgin rescues a disappointed administrator from a pact with the devil, has a Roman emperor killed by a long-dead martyr, saves a Jewish boy from being burned alive, and shields an abbess from the shame of pregnancy. Each story illustrates the boundlessness of Mary’s mercy. In the Tract on Abuses, a letter that resembles a religious pamphlet, Nigel rails against ecclesiastical corruption and worldly entanglements.Alongside authoritative editions of the Latin texts, this volume offers the first translations of both works into English.

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