Offers the first book-length examination of Statius' unfinished epic, the Achilleid.

Tracing the escapades of Achilles' erotic history - whether in same-sex or opposite-sex relationships - this book explains how these relationships were developed and revealed, or elided and concealed, in the writing and visual arts following Homer.

Statius' unfinished epic, the Achilleid, explores Achilles' mother's attempt to save her son from the Trojan War by dressing him as a girl. This first book-length study of the poem offers a detailed interpretation and explores questions of the poem's reception and of gender in antiquity.

This book provides vocabulary and commentary to Statius' unfinished epic poem Achilleid ("[The book or story] of Achilles"), which was intended to tell the life of the hero Achilles from his youth to his death at Troy. The one book and part of a second that survive (a total of 1,128 lines) recount Achilles' life from his time with the centaur Chiron to an episode in which his mother, the sea goddess Thetis, disguises him as a girl on the island of Scyros, where he falls in love with, rapes, and impregnates the princess Deidamia, who gives birth to a son, Pyrrhus. Or, to put it in somewhat different (and far more eloquent) words: "It is about a wild boy brought up in the disappointment of lost immortality, his first experience of human culture, his encounter with the odd puzzle of sex and gender; and it dramatizes the emergence, despite Achilles' confused family circumstances and lack of clear paternal guidance, of his innate virtue and destiny as an epic hero. It is thus a meditation on sons, mothers, foster-fathers and biological fathers, men and animals, men and gods, sex as power, gender as a cultural construction, and gender as innate and essential." (P. J. Heslin, The Transvestite Achilles [Cambridge, 2005], 297) The notes explicate certain syntactical and grammatical aspects that may be challenging for intermediate-advanced students, point out some (not all!) of the various literary/rhetorical figures and tropes that are employed, and supply information on historical, social, cultural, and literary issues raised by Statius' text. In order to encourage reading of the text out loud (an essential component of Latin verse's literary and musical essence, and one that often works hand-in-glove with the literary/rhetorical figures and tropes used, a section of the introduction is devoted to dactylic hexameter, the meter in which Statius' poem - like that of nearly all Latin epics - is written. Also included is John Gower's "Tale of Achilles and Deidamia," a Middle English retelling from the year 1390 of the central episode of Statius' Achilleid. For Gower's verses, glosses of words and idioms whose spelling and/or meaning has changed considerably since his time have been provided to assist the reader in understanding this fascinating offspring of Statius' poem.

In fourteenth-century Italy, literacy became accessible to a significantly larger portion of the lay population (allegedly between 60 and 80 percent in Florence) and provided a crucial means for the vernacularization and secularization of learning, and for the democratization of citizenship. Dante Alighieri's education and oeuvre sit squarely at the heart of this historical and cultural transition and provide an ideal case study for investigating the impact of Latin education on the consolidation of autonomous vernacular literature in the Middle Ages, a fascinating and still largely unexamined phenomenon. On the basis of manuscript and archival evidence, Gianferrari reconstructs the contents, practice, and readings of Latin instruction in the urban schools of fourteenth-century Florence. It also shows Dante's continuous engagement with this culture of teaching in his poetics, thus revealing his contribution to the expansion of vernacular literacy and education. The book argues that to achieve his unprecedented position of authority as a vernacular intellectual, Dante conceived his poetic works as an alternative educational program for laypeople, who could read and write in the vernacular but had little or no proficiency in Latin. By reconstructing the culture of literacy shared by Dante and his lay readers, Dante's Education shifts critical attention from his legacy as Italy's national poet, and a "great books" author in the Western canon, to his experience as a marginal intellectual engaged in advancing a marginal culture.

Drawing on evidence from archaeology, art history, and textual sources to contextualize Greco-Scythian metalwork in ancient society, Meyer offers unique introductions to the archaeology of Scythia and its ties to Asia and classical Greece, modern museum and visual culture studies, and the intellectual history of classics in Russia and the West.

Publisher Description

Scholars have long noted the strikingly visual aspects of Statius’ poetry. This book advances our understanding of how these visual aspects work through intertextual analysis. In the Thebaid, for instance, Statius repeatedly presents “visual narratives” in the form of linked descriptive (or ekphrastic) passages. These narratives are subject to multiple forms visual interpretation inflected by the intertextual background. Similarly, the Achilleid activates particularly Roman conceptions of masculinity through repeated evocations of Achilles’ blush. The Silvae offer a diversity of modes of viewing that evoke Roman conceptions of gender and class.

Donnell engages gender theory and cultural studies in order to shed light on cross-dressing- a common though poorly understood practice- in plays performed in Spain and Colonial Spanish America during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The author shows how certain naturalized assumptions about masculinity and femininity are unmasked through the cross-dressed performance of works attributed to Lope de Rueda, Morales, Lope de Vega, Monroy y Silva, and Calderon.

Neither older empiricist positions that genre is an abstract concept, useless for the study of individual works of literature, nor the recent (post) modern reluctance to subject literary production to any kind of classification seem to have stilled the discussion on the various aspects of genre in classical literature. Having moved from more or less essentialist and/or prescriptive positions towards a more dynamic conception of the generic model, research on genre is currently considering "pushing beyond the boundaries", "impurity", "instability", "enrichment" and "genre-bending". The aim of this volume is to raise questions of such generic mobility in Latin literature. The papers explore ways in which works assigned to a particular generic area play host to formal and substantive elements associated with different or even opposing genres; assess literary works which seem to challenge perceived generic norms; highlight, along the literary-historical, the ideological and political backgrounds to "dislocations" of the generic map.