Faculty Books

The Passions of John Addington Symonds

The Passions of John Addington Symonds

John Addington Symonds (Bristol 1840 – Rome 1893) was one of Victorian Britain’s most prolific authors, with works that included poems, translations, travel essays, and scholarly studies on topics ranging from classical literature to the Renaissance to the poetry of his contemporaries. Today, however, he is usually remembered for his long unpublished Memoirs, a major early monument of queer life-writing, and for two privately printed, secretly circulated essays, one of which includes the earliest printed appearance in English of the word homosexual. This new word, first coined in German, has long provided a useful milestone for historians of sexuality charting the emergence not only of new typologies but also of whole new regimes of knowledge. But what of the rest of Symonds’s vast body of work? This book returns to Symonds, not as the origin of a now familiar history, but as a far more complex thinker, with an ambitious vision of the queerness of the world itself—and of what it means to live in it.

The Moon in the Greek and Roman imagination: Selenography in myth, literature, science and philosophy

The Moon in the Greek and Roman imagination: Selenography in myth, literature, science and philosophy

The Moon exerted a powerful influence on ancient intellectual history, as a playground for the scientific imagination. This book explores the history of the Moon in the Greco-Roman imaginary from Homer to Lucian, with special focus on those accounts of the Moon, its attributes, and its ‘inhabitants’ given by ancient philosophers, natural scientists and imaginative writers including Pythagoreans, Plato and the Old Academy, Varro, Plutarch and Lucian. ní Mheallaigh shows how the Moon’s enigmatic presence made it a key site for thinking about the gaze (erotic, philosophical and scientific) and the relation between appearance and reality. It was also a site for hoax in antiquity as well as today. Central issues explored include the view from elsewhere (selēnoskopia), the relation of science and fiction, the interaction between the beginnings of science in the classical polis and the imperial period, and the limits of knowledge itself.

Sound and the Ancient Senses

Sound and the Ancient Senses

Sound leaves no ruins and no residues, but it is experienced constantly. It is ubiquitous but fleeting. Even silence has sound, even absence resonates. Sound and the Ancient Senses aims to hear the lost sounds of antiquity, from the sounds of the human body to those of the gods, from the bathhouse to the Forum, from the chirp of a cicada to the music of the celestial spheres. Sound plays so great a role in shaping our environments as to make it a crucial sounding board for thinking about space and ecology, emotions and experience, mortality and the divine, orality and textuality, and the self and its connection to others. From antiquity to the present day, poets and philosophers have strained to hear the ways that sounds structure our world and identities. This volume looks at theories and practices of hearing and producing sounds in ritual contexts, medicine, mourning, music, poetry, drama, erotics, philosophy, rhetoric, linguistics, vocality, and on the page, and shows how ancient ideas of sound still shape how and what we hear today. As the first comprehensive introduction to the soundscapes of antiquity, this volume makes a significant contribution to the rapidly growing fields of sound and voice studies and is the final volume of the series, The Senses in Antiquity.

The Poetics of Power in Augustan Rome

The Poetics of Power in Augustan Rome

Augustus’ success in implementing monarchical rule at Rome is often attributed to innovations in the symbolic language of power, from the star marking Julius Caesar’s deification to buildings like the Palatine complex and the Forum Augustum to rituals including triumphs and funerals. This book illuminates Roman subjects’ vital role in creating and critiquing these images, in keeping with the Augustan poets’ sustained exploration of audiences’ active part in constructing verbal and visual meaning. From Vergil to Ovid, these poets publicly interpret, debate, and disrupt Rome’s evolving political iconography, reclaiming it as the common property of an imagined republic of readers. In showing how these poets used reading as a metaphor for the mutual constitution of Augustan authority and a means of exercising interpretive libertas under the principate, this book offers a holistic new vision of Roman imperial power and its representation that will stimulate scholars and students alike.

Winner of the 2020 CAMWS First Book Prize
Bryn Mawr Classical Review

Models from the Past in Roman Culture: A World of Exempla

Models from the Past in Roman Culture: A World of Exempla

Historical examples played a key role in ancient Roman culture, and Matthew Roller’s book presents a coherent model for understanding the rhetorical, moral, and historiographical operations of Roman exemplarity. It examines the process of observing, evaluating, and commemorating noteworthy actors, or deeds, and then holding those performances up as norms by which to judge subsequent actors or as patterns for them to imitate. The model is fleshed out via detailed case studies of individual exemplary performers, the monuments that commemorate them, and the later contexts – the political arguments and social debates – in which these figures are invoked to support particular positions or agendas. Roller also considers the boundaries of, and ancient alternatives to, exemplary modes of argumentation, morality, and historical thinking. The book will engage anyone interested in how societies, from ancient Rome to today, invoke past performers and their deeds to address contemporary concerns and interests.

The Hippocrates Code: Unraveling the Ancient Mysteries of Modern Medical Terminology

The Hippocrates Code: Unraveling the Ancient Mysteries of Modern Medical Terminology

In this book lies a key for decoding modern medical terminology, a living language that, despite some quirks, is best approached as an ordered system. Rather than presenting a mere list of word elements to be absorbed through rote memorization, The Hippocrates Code offers a thorough, linguistically-centered explanation of the rules of the terminological game, both for the language of medicine and for scientific vocabulary in general. Its careful exposition of Latin and Greek linguistic principles—along with a healthy dose of innovative exercises—empowers students to successfully employ the word elements that are the building blocks of modern medical terminology. Along the way, fascinating discussions of the practice of medicine in the ancient world provide an integral aid to the understanding of medical vocabulary.

Seals, Craft, and Community in Bronze Age Crete

Seals, Craft, and Community in Bronze Age Crete

Generations of scholars have grappled with the origins of ‘palace’ society on Minoan Crete, seeking to explain when and how life on the island altered monumentally. Emily Anderson turns light on the moment just before the palaces, recognizing it as a remarkably vibrant phase of socio-cultural innovation. Exploring the role of craftspersons, travelers and powerful objects, she argues that social change resulted from creative work that forged connections at new scales and in novel ways. This study focuses on an extraordinary corpus of sealstones which have been excavated across Crete. Fashioned of imported ivory and engraved with images of dashing lions, these distinctive objects linked the identities of their distant owners. Anderson argues that it was the repeated but pioneering actions of such diverse figures, people and objects alike, that dramatically changed the shape of social life in the Aegean at the turn of the second millennium BCE.

From Literacy to Literature: England, 1300-1400

From Literacy to Literature: England, 1300-1400

The first lessons we learn in school can stay with us all our lives, but this was nowhere more true than in the last decades of the fourteenth century when grammar-school students were not only learning to read and write, but understanding, for the first time, that their mother tongue, English, was grammatical. The efflorescence of Ricardian poetry was not a direct result of this change, but it was everywhere shaped by it. This book characterizes this close connection between literacy training and literature, as it is manifest in the fine and ambitious poetry by Gower, Langland and Chaucer, at this transitional moment. This is also a book about the way medieval training in grammar (or grammatica) shaped the poetic arts in the Middle Ages fully as much as rhetorical training. It answers the curious question of what language was used to teach Latin grammar to the illiterate. It reveals, for the first time, what the surviving schoolbooks from the period actually contain. It describes what form a “grammar school” took in a period from which no school buildings or detailed descriptions survive. And it scrutinizes the processes of elementary learning with sufficient care to show that, for the grown medieval schoolboy, well-learned books functioned, not only as a touchstone for wisdom, but as a knowledge so personal and familiar that it was equivalent to what we would now call “experience.”

Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception

Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception

Fragmented, buried, and largely lost, the classical past presents formidable obstacles to anyone who would seek to know it. Deep Classics is the study of these obstacles and, in particular, of the way in which the contemplation of the classical past resembles—and has even provided a model for—other kinds of human endeavor. This volume offers a new way to understand the modalities and aims of Classics itself, through the ages. Its individual chapters draw fruitful connections between the reception of the classical and current concerns in the philosophy of mind, cognitive theory, epistemology, media studies, sense studies, aesthetics, queer theory, the history of science and eco-criticism. This groundbreaking collection of essays makes a pointed intervention in the study of the classical tradition, now generally known as classical reception studies.

The Ancient Phonograph

The Ancient Phonograph

Long before the invention of the phonograph, the written word was unrivaled as a medium of the human voice. In The Ancient Phonograph, Shane Butler takes us back to an age, long before Edison, when writing itself was still relatively new. He meticulously reconstructs a series of Greek and Roman soundscapes ranging from Aristotle to Augustine. Here the real voices of tragic actors, ambitious orators, and singing emperors blend with the imagined voices of lovesick nymphs, tormented heroes, and angry gods. The resonant world we encounter in ancient sources is at first unfamiliar, populated by texts that speak and sing, often with no clear difference between the two. But Butler discovers a commonality that invites a deeper understanding of why voices mattered then, and why they have mattered since.

With later examples that range from Petrarch to Puccini, Mozart to Jimi Hendrix, Butler offers an ambitious attempt to rethink the voice — as an anatomical presence, a conceptual category, and a source of pleasure and wonder. He carefully and critically assesses the strengths and limits of recent theoretical approaches to the voice by Adriana Cavarero and Mladen Dolar and makes a rich and provocative range of ancient material available for the first time to students and scholars in voice studies, sound studies, and media theory. The Ancient Phonograph will appeal not only to classicists but to anyone interested in the verbal arts — literature, oratory, song — and the nature of aesthetic experience.

Reading fiction with Lucian: Fakes, freaks and hyperreality

Reading fiction with Lucian: Fakes, freaks and hyperreality

This book offers a captivating new interpretation of Lucian as a fictional theorist and writer to stand alongside the novelists of the day, bringing to bear on his works a whole new set of reading strategies. It argues that the aesthetic and cultural issues Lucian faced, in a world of mimesis and replication, were akin to those found in postmodern contexts: the ubiquity of the fake, the erasure of origins, the focus on the freakish and weird at the expense of the traditional. In addition to exploring the texture of Lucian’s own writing, Dr ní Mheallaigh uses Lucian as a focal point through which to examine other fictional texts of the period, including Antonius Diogenes’ The Incredible Things Beyond Thule, Dictys’ Journal of the Trojan War and Ptolemy Chennus’ Novel History, and reveals the importance of fiction’s engagement with its contemporary culture of writing, entertainment and wonder.

Synaesthesia and the Ancient Senses

Synaesthesia and the Ancient Senses

Like us, the ancient Greeks and Romans came to know and understand the world through their senses. Yet sensory experience has rarely been considered in the study of antiquity and, even when the senses are examined, sight is regularly privileged.

Synaesthesia and the Ancient Senses presents a radical reappraisal of antiquity’s textures, flavors, aromas, sounds and sights. It offers both a fresh look at the ancient world and an opportunity to deepen the reading of classical literature.

This book will appeal to readers in classical society and literature, philosophy, and social and cultural history. All Greek and Latin is translated, and technical matters are explained for the non-specialist. The introduction sets the ancient senses within the history of aesthetics and the subsequent essays explore the senses throughout the classical period and on to the modern reception of classical literature.

The Matter of the Page

The Matter of the Page

Ancient and medieval literary texts often call attention to their existence as physical objects. Shane Butler helps us to understand why. Arguing that writing has always been as much a material struggle as an intellectual one, The Matter of the Page offers timely lessons for the digital age about how creativity works and why literature moves us.

Butler begins with some considerations about the materiality of the literary text, both as a process (the draft) and a product (the book), and he traces the curious history of “the page” from scroll to manuscript codex to printed book and beyond. He then offers a series of unforgettable portraits of authors at work: Thucydides struggling to describe his own diseased body; Vergil ready to burn an epic poem he could not finish; Lucretius wrestling with words even as he fights the madness that will drive him to suicide; Cicero mesmerized by the thought of erasing his entire career; Seneca plumbing the depths of the soul in the wax of his tablets; and Dhuoda, who sees the book she writes as a door, a tunnel, a womb. Butler reveals how the work of writing transformed each of these authors into his or her own first reader, and he explains what this metamorphosis teaches us about how we too should read.

Middle English Literature: A Cultural History

Middle English Literature: A Cultural History

This history restores Middle English literature to the rich culture that produced it by means of five unusual categories (technology, insurgency, statecraft, place, and jurisdiction). It also uses these categories to show how this literature was remarkably effective, able to shape this larger culture in its turn.

Dining Posture in Ancient Rome: Bodies, Values, and Status

Dining Posture in Ancient Rome: Bodies, Values, and Status

What was really going on at Roman banquets? In this lively new book, veteran Romanist Matthew Roller looks at a little-explored feature of Roman culture: dining posture. In ancient Rome, where dining was an indicator of social position as well as an extended social occasion, dining posture offered a telling window into the day-to-day lives of the city’s inhabitants.

This book investigates the meaning and importance of the three principal dining postures–reclining, sitting, and standing–in the period 200 B.C.-200 A.D. It explores the social values and distinctions associated with each of the postures and with the diners who assumed them. Roller shows that dining posture was entangled with a variety of pressing social issues, such as gender roles and relations, sexual values, rites of passage, and distinctions among the slave, freed, and freeborn conditions.

Timely in light of the recent upsurge of interest in Roman dining, this book is equally concerned with the history of the body and of bodily practices in social contexts. Roller gathers evidence for these practices and their associated values not only from elite literary texts, but also from subelite visual representations–specifically, funerary monuments from the city of Rome and wall paintings of dining scenes from Pompeii.

Engagingly written, Dining Posture in Ancient Rome will appeal not only to the classics scholar, but also to anyone interested in how life was lived in the Eternal City.

Angelo Poliziano: Letters (vol. 1)

Angelo Poliziano: Letters (vol. 1)

Angelo Poliziano (1454–1494) was one of the great scholar-poets of the Italian Renaissance and the leading literary figure of the Age of Lorenzo de’ Medici, “il Magnifico.” His correspondence gives us an intimate glimpse of the revival of classical literature from the pen of a man at the very center of the Renaissance movement.

This volume illuminates his close friendship with the philosopher Pico della Mirandola and includes much of the correspondence concerning the composition and reception of his Miscellanies, a revolutionary work of philology. It also includes his famous and moving letter on the death of Lorenzo de’ Medici. This volume contains the first modern edition of the Latin text and the first translation of the letters into English.

The Grounds of English Literature

The Grounds of English Literature

The centuries just after the Norman Conquest are the forgotten period of English literary history. In fact, the years 1066-1300 witnessed an unparalleled ingenuity in the creation of written forms, for this was a time when almost every writer was unaware of the existence of other English writing. In a series of detailed readings of the more important early Middle English works, Cannon shows how the many and varied texts of the period laid the foundations for the project of English literature. This richness is given credit for the first time in these readings by means of an innovative theory of literary form that accepts every written shape as itself a unique contribution to the history of ideas. This theory also suggests that the impoverished understanding of literature we now commonly employ is itself a legacy of this early period, an attribute of the single form we have learned to call ‘romance’. A number of reading methods have lately taught us to be more generous in our understandings of what literature might be, but this book shows us that the very variety we now strive to embrace anew actually formed the grounds of English literature-a richness we only lost when we forgot how to recognize it.

The Hand of Cicero

The Hand of Cicero

What did Antony want with Cicero’s hand?

Hundreds perished in Rome’s Second Proscription, but one victim is remembered above all others. Cicero stands out, however, not only because of his fame, but also because his murder included a unique addition to the customary decapitation. For his corpse was deprived not only of its head, but also of its right hand. Plutarch tells us why Mark Antony wanted the hand that wrote the Philippics. But how did it come to pass that Rome’s greatest orator could be so hated for the speeches he had written?

Charting a course through Cicero’s celebrated career, Shane Butler examines two principal relationships between speech and writing in Roman oratory: the use of documentary evidence by orators and the ‘publication’ of both delivered and undelivered speeches. He presents this fascinating theory that the success of Rome’s greatest orator depended as much on writing as speaking; he also argues against the conventional wisdom that Rome was an ‘oral society’, in which writing was rare and served only practical, secondary purposes.

Constructing Autocracy: Aristocrats and Emperors in Julio-Claudian Rome

Constructing Autocracy: Aristocrats and Emperors in Julio-Claudian Rome

Rome’s transition from a republican system of government to an imperial regime comprised more than a century of civil upheaval and rapid institutional change. Yet the establishment of a ruling dynasty, centered around a single leader, came as a cultural and political shock to Rome’s aristocracy, who had shared power in the previous political order. How did the imperial regime manage to establish itself and how did the Roman elites from the time of Julius Caesar to Nero make sense of it? In this compelling book, Matthew Roller reveals a “dialogical” process at work, in which writers and philosophers vigorously negotiated and contested the nature and scope of the emperor’s authority, despite the consensus that he was the ultimate authority figure in Roman society.

Roller seeks evidence for this “thinking out” of the new order in a wide range of republican and imperial authors, with an emphasis on Lucan and Seneca the Younger. He shows how elites assessed the impact of the imperial system on traditional aristocratic ethics and examines how several longstanding authority relationships in Roman society—those of master to slave, father to son, and gift-creditor to gift-debtor—became competing models for how the emperor did or should relate to his aristocratic subjects. By revealing this ideological activity to be not merely reactive but also constitutive of the new order, Roller contributes to ongoing debates about the character of the Roman imperial system and about the “politics” of literature.

The Making of Chaucer’s English: A Study of Words

The Making of Chaucer’s English: A Study of Words

This book is a study of Chaucer’s words. It describes how these words became evidence for calling Chaucer the “father of English poetry” but, also, why that label is wrong. It shows that Chaucer’s language is, in fact, traditional and argues that his linguistic innovation was as much performance as fact. It provides a thorough history of every one of Chaucer’s words and maps the origins and patterns of use that have made these words so compelling for six hundred years.