One morning, as I was writing, I suddenly understood that as a species, through incredible stubbornness, we were able to write love into our genetic makeup, and that this is enough to redeem us all. We were given mouths to bite with, and with deep intelligence and beauty, we learned to kiss each other. Part performance lecture, part auto-fictional memoir, Divine Invention is Sergio Blanco's attempt to say something new about love. To do so, he recalls his own experiences of love, true and invented, and explores the history of love in art, literature, music, and science. The result is a life-affirming new play. Written by acclaimed Franco-Uruguayan playwright Sergio Blanco (Thebes Land, The Rage of Narcissus, When You Pass Over My Tomb) and translated by his long-time collaborator Daniel Goldman, Divine Invention is 'collaboration to savour by two masters of the form' (Lyn Gardner). This edition was published to coincide with the English language world premiere at Edinburgh Fringe Festival's Summerhall in August 2024.

In follow-up to her acclaimed Privilege of Being a Woman;, Dr. von Hildebrand expands the discussion to explore how the fullness of human nature is found in the perfect union between man and woman. God chose to create man doubly complex. He made man of both soul and body a spiritual reality and a material reality. To crown this complexity, He created them male and female. Dr. von Hildebrand elucidates the tragic separation that happened with original sin and the consequences of this brokenness in the world today: the distortion of the male and female genius, supernatural blindness, and the triumph of secularism. She explores how this brokenness can be healed by following God s Divine plan for man and woman. We see this first and foremost in our Blessed Mother, exemplar of the path to holiness. This is also seen in the characteristics of saintly male / female relationships between husbands and wives, fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, brothers and sisters, and holy friendships. It is only by coming to more fully understand the Divine plan for man and woman, and submitting ourselves to His plan, that true complementarity harmony of body and soul, male and female can be accomplished.

Working at the margins of aesthetics and politics, Patrick Vauday challenges the dominant assumptions of our mediatized society and its disposition towards images. This challenge does not advocate eliminating images altogether, but rather entreats us to see them in a different light.

The writings of two influential Elizabethan thinkers testify to the influence of Old English law and literature on Tudor society and self-image. Full of fresh and illuminating insights into a way of looking at the English past in the sixteenth century... a book with the potential to deepen and transform our understanding of Tudor attitudes to ethnic identity and the national past. Philip Schwyzer, University of Exeter. Laurence Nowell (1530-c.1570), author of the first dictionary of Old English, and William Lambarde (1536-1601), Nowell's protégé and eventually the first editor of theOld English Laws, are key figures in Elizabethan historical discourses and in its political and literary society; through their work the period between the Germanic migrations and the Norman Conquest came to be regarded as a foundational time for Elizabethan England, overlapping with and contributing to contemporary debates on the shape of Elizabethan English language. Their studies took different strategies in demonstrating the role of early medieval history in Elizabethan national -- even imperial -- identity, while in Lambarde's legal writings Old English law codes become identical with the "ancient laws" that underpinned contemporary common law. Their efforts contradict the assumption that Anglo-Saxon studies did not effectively participate in Tudor nationalism outside of Protestant polemic; instead, it was a vital part of making history "English". Their work furthers our understanding of both the history of medieval studies and the importance of early Anglo-Saxon studies to Tudor nationalism. Rebecca Brackmann is Assistant Professor of English, Lincoln Memorial University.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1871.

From Homer to Hollywood, the western storytelling tradition has canonised a distinctive set of narrative values characterised by tight economy and closure. This book traces the formation of that classical paradigm in the development of ancient storytelling from Homer to Heliodorus. To tell this story, the book sets out to rehabilitate the idea of 'plot', notoriously disconnected from any recognised system of terminology in literary theory. The first part of the book draws on developments in narratology and cognitive science to propose a way of formally describing the way stories are structured and understood. This model is then used to write a history of the emergence of the classical plot type in the four ancient genres that shaped it - Homeric epic, fifth-century tragedy, New Comedy, and the Greek novel - with insights into the fundamental narrative poetics of each.

The first comprehensive intellectual history of alphabet studies. Inventing the Alphabet provides the first account of two-and-a-half millennia of scholarship on the alphabet. Drawing on decades of research, Johanna Drucker dives into sometimes obscure and esoteric references, dispelling myths and identifying a pantheon of little-known scholars who contributed to our modern understandings of the alphabet, one of the most important inventions in human history. Beginning with Biblical tales and accounts from antiquity, Drucker traces the transmission of ancient Greek thinking about the alphabet’s origin and debates about how Moses learned to read. The book moves through the centuries, finishing with contemporary concepts of the letters in alpha-numeric code used for global communication systems. Along the way, we learn about magical and angelic alphabets, antique inscriptions on coins and artifacts, and the comparative tables of scripts that continue through the development of modern fields of archaeology and paleography. This is the first book to chronicle the story of the intellectual history through which the alphabet has been “invented” as an object of scholarship.