It is a narration with autobiographical touches. There is a thoughtful and charming account of the experiences and observations of the author. The love-story encompasses all his pains, sorrows and desires. A heart-felt book, it offers a deep analysis of human feelings....

It is a narration with autobiographical touches. There is a thoughtful and charming account of the experiences and observations of the author. The love-story encompasses all his pains, sorrows and desires. A heart-felt book, it offers a deep analysis of human feelings....

It is a narration with autobiographical touches. There is a thoughtful and charming account of the experiences and observations of the author. The love-story encompasses all his pains, sorrows and desires. A heart-felt book, it offers a deep analysis of human feelings....

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 written word is one of the defining elements of Christian experience. As vigorous in the 1st century as it is in the 21st, Christian literature has had a significant function in history, and teachers and students need to be reminded of this powerful literary legacy. Covering 2,000 years, The Encyclopedia of Christian Literature is the first encyclopedia devoted to Christian writers and books. In addition to an overview of the Christian literature, this two-volume set also includes 40 essays on the principal genres of Christian literature and more than 400 bio-bibliographical essays describing the principal writers and their works. These essays examine the evolution of Christian thought as reflected in the literature of every age. The companion volume also features bibliographies, an index, a timeline of Christian Literature, and a list of the greatest Christian authors. The encyclopedia will appeal not only to scholars and Christian evangelicals, but students and teachers in seminaries and theological schools, as well as to the growing body of Christian readers and bibliophiles.

Anthology of a selection of early modern works on memory.

What might contemporary thinkers learn from prayer? The seventeenth-century French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche suggested a possibility: that prayer teaches us how to attend. This book explores the precedents of Malebranche s advice by reading John Donne s poetic prayers in the context of what David Marno calls the art of holy attention. This requires an understanding of attention s role in Christian devotion, which he provides by uncovering a tradition of holy attention that spans from ascetic thinkers and Church Fathers to Catholic spiritual exercises and Protestant prayer manuals. Donne s devotional poems occupy a unique position in this tradition. Marno identifies in them a devotional model of thinking whose aim is to experience an affect of attention. Marno s argument is framed by compelling close readings of Death, be not proud, Donne s most triumphant poem about the resurrection. Elsewhere, Marno takes up Claudius s prayer in "Hamlet" and Saint Augustine s account of attention in the "Soliloquies" and the "Confessions." The book ends with a Coda on the aftermath of holy attention in the philosophies of Descartes and Malebranche."

The essays in Fighting for Rome confront the traumatic disjunction between the militarist culture of classical Rome, with its heavy investment in valour, conquest and triumph, and the domination of its history by civil war, where Roman soldiers killed so many Romans for control of Rome. The essays gathered and rewritten here range across the literary forms (history, satire, lyric and epic) and work closely with the ancient texts (Appian and Julius Caesar; Horace; Lucan and Statius; Tacitus and Livy). Close reading and powerful translation communicate the ancient writers' efforts to grasp and respond to the Roman civil wars, and to their product, Roman terror under the Caesars. The book aims to bring to life strong reactions to a world order run by civil war.

How and why childhood became so important to such a wide range of Romantic writers has long been one of the central questions of literary historical studies. Ann Wierda Rowland discovers new answers to this question in the rise of a vernacular literary tradition. In the Romantic period the child came fully into its own as the object of increasing social concern and cultural investment; at the same time, modern literary culture consolidated itself along vernacular, national lines. Romanticism and Childhood is the first study to examine the intersections of these historical developments and the first study to demonstrate that a rhetoric of infancy and childhood - the metaphors, images, figures and phrases repeatedly used to represent and conceptualize childhood - enabled Romantic writers to construct a national literary history and culture capable of embracing a wider range of literary forms.

This book joins a growing trend toward transnational literary studies and revives a venerable tradition of Anglo-Italian scholarship centering on John Milton. Correcting misperceptions that have diminished the international dimensions of his life and work, it broadly surveys Milton’s Italianate studies, travels, poetics, politics, and religious convictions. While his debts to Machiavelli and other classical republicans are often noted, few contemporary critics have explored the Italian sources of his anti-papal, anti-episcopal, and anti-formalist religious outlook. Relying on Milton’s own testimony, this book explores its roots in Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and that great "Venetian enemy of the pope," Paolo Sarpi, thereby correcting a recent tendency to make native English contexts dominate his development. This tendency is partly due to a mistaken belief that Italy was in steep decline during and after Milton’s travels of 1638-1639, the period immediately before he produced his prose critiques of the English Church, its canon law, and its censorship. Yet these were also fundamentally "Italian" issues that he skillfully adapted to meet contemporary English needs, a practice enabled by his extraordinarily positive experience of the Italian language, cities, academies, and music, the latter of which ultimately influenced Milton’s "operatic" drama, Samson Agonistes. Besides republicanism and theology (radical doctrines of free grace and free will), equally strong influences treated here include Italian Neoplatonism, cosmology, and romance epic. By making these traditions his own, Milton became what John Steadman once described as an "Italianate Englishman" whose classical "literary tastes and critical orientation...were...to a considerable extent" molded by Italian critics (1976), a view that is fully credited and updated here.