DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser" (A Romantic Novel) by Aubrey Beardsley. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

This collection of sixteen essays deals with the role of magic, religion and witchcraft in European culture, 1450-1650, and the critical role of the visual in that culture. It covers the relationship of humanism and magic; the intersection of religious ritual, orthodoxy and power; the discursive links between the visual language of witchcraft and contemporary anxieties about sexuality and savagery. The introductory chapter urges us to exorcise our tendency to reduce historical experiences of the demonic to forms of unreason created in a distant past. Only then can we understand the role of the demonic in our historical definition of the self and the other. Richly illustrated with 112 images, the book will interest historians and art historians.

Why are we interested in history at all? Why do we feel the need to distinguish between past and present? This book investigates how the notion of sublime historical experience complicates and challenges existing conceptions of language, truth, and knowledge.

"Legends of the Sibilline Mountains" is a small book about an obscure corner of Italy and an equally obscure backwater of world literature. And yet the subjects it touches upon--amongst them, the roots of literature in popular consciousness, the intimations of Christian existentialism, the absorption of pagan traditions into Christianity--reach far and wide. Goddess worship, necromantic rites, the death of Pontius Pilate, Benevenuto Cellini, Goethe's "Faust," Wagner's "Tannhauser"...they all connect here in a real place of strange geological formations and magical beauty. The Sibilline Mountains, dividing Le Marche from Umbria, were "celebrated in the 14th and 15th centuries throughout all Europe for magical fairy tales and necromantic initiations," according to the author, Giuseppe Santarelli. In the most famous of these tales a mysterious Sibyl inhabits a grotto devoted to the pleasures of the flesh, luring knights to eternal damnation. Another legend concerns the Lago di Pilato, a mountaintop lake where Pontius Pilate's body had been cast that later became a destination for demonic rituals. In a witty and personal tone Santarelli, director of the Sanctuary of Loreto, discusses the origins of the myths in folklore, their literary transformations through the centuries, and the archeological traces they left behind.

A Knight at the Opera examines the remarkable and unknown role that the medieval legend (and Wagner opera) Tannhäuser played in Jewish cultural life in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book analyzes how three of the greatest Jewish thinkers of that era, Heinrich Heine, Theodor Herzl, and I. L. Peretz, used this central myth of Germany to strengthen Jewish culture and to attack anti-Semitism. In the original medieval myth, a Christian knight lives in sin with the seductive pagan goddess Venus in the Venusberg. He escapes her clutches and makes his way to Rome to seek absolution from the Pope. The Pope does not pardon Tannhäuser and he returns to the Venusberg. During the course of A Knight at the Opera, readers will see how Tannhäuser evolves from a medieval knight, to Heine's German scoundrel in early modern Europe, to Wagner's idealized German male, and finally to Peretz's pious Jewish scholar in the Land of Israel. Venus herself also undergoes major changes from a pagan goddess, to a lusty housewife, to an overbearing Jewish mother. The book also discusses how the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, was so inspired by Wagner's opera that he wrote The Jewish State while attending performances of it, and he even had the Second Zionist Congress open to the music of Tannhäuser's overture. A Knight at the Opera uses Tannhäuser as a way to examine the changing relationship between Jews and the broader world during the advent of the modern era, and to question if any art, even that of a prominent anti-Semite, should be considered taboo.

“Part rollicking historical potboiler, part theological mystery” from the acclaimed author of The Dress Lodger and The Mammoth Cheese (Entertainment Weekly). A riveting mystery that recalls the work of Umberto Eco and Barry Unsworth, A Stolen Tongue is the captivating debut novel that launched critically acclaimed author Sheri Holman’s literary career. In 1483, Father Felix Fabri sails from Germany to Mount Sinai on a pilgrimage to venerate the relics of Saint Katherine of Alexandria. But at each of the shrines he visits throughout Greece and Palestine, he finds that the remains of Katherine’s body are being stolen piece by piece: her hand, her ear, and then her tongue vanish from their holy resting places. Desperate to discover the thief and save his saint from such appalling desecration, Felix is thrust into a strange mystery that takes him across the desert and plumbs the depths of his soul. “Holman seduces you into a world of priests, rogues, saints, a world bright with horizon, wonder, piety. Her prose, tart, racy, and somber, will sing in your soul a long while.”—Frank McCourt, Pulitzer Prize-winning, #1 New York Times-bestselling author of Angela’s Ashes “Holman tells a fascinating story. From the opening scene in Crete to the harrowing finale in the Sinai desert, she knows how to create suspense.”—The Washington Post Book World “Sheri Holman writes with extraordinary assurance and style.”—Miranda Seymour, author of Bugatti Queen “The best historical thriller I have read since Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose.”—Alain de Botton, author of The Course of Love