Queen Morgana will not allow free passage between the realms of the Fae and of humans. Because of this, both realms are dying. The only bridge between the worlds is the place where dreams live in the daylight: Renaissance Faires! A group of humans stumbles through the portal: a cocky movie make-up man who hits on the wrong woman, a Vietnam vet whose nightmares make living a chore, a private detective on the strangest case of his career, a crippled cop and a burger store manager who loves to go LARPing. One of them has to show the Queen of the Fae what true love is or they will perish in the greater darkness that is growing day by day. Oh, and in the process, they have to try and figure out who the strange guy in the Viking helmet is and why he is giggling all the time...

Once the Fae and mortal worlds lived side by side, then Queen Morgana became unhappy with a mortal hero and closed the passage between the worlds. For many years the worlds of man and fae could be breached only in dreams or where dreams lived in the daylight: Renaissance Faires! Then the barriers were opened again and the two worlds became as one—that was when things got interesting! Now gods and ogres, jinn and demons cross into the world of mortal man with alarming regularity. In this brave new world, a farmer makes a wish and his deal with a Leprechaun is not what he bargained for; an Englishman attends a party and accepts a terrible gift; a Manhattan bar bouncer throws the wrong little folk out of his pub and an actuary falls in love with a beautiful jinn princess. Humans beware, when Renfairies attack, danger follows!

Fairies have been revered and feared, sometimes simultaneously, throughout recorded history. This encyclopedia of concise entries, from the A-senee-ki-waku of northeastern North America to the Zips of Central America and Mexico, includes more than 2,500 individual beings and species of fairy and nature spirits from a wide range of mythologies and religions from all over the globe.

This 2-volume book is one of the best-known works by the British author Violet Paget that features the studies of the antique and the mediaeval in the Renaissance, symbolically named Euphorion after the marvelous child born of the mystic marriage of Faust and Helena from Goethe's drama. Contents: Introduction The Sacrifice The Italy of the Elizabethan Dramatists The Outdoor Poetry Symmetria Prisca The Portrait Art The School of Boiardo Mediaeval Love Epilogue

Few scholars nursed on the literary canon would dispute that knowledge of Western literature benefits readers and writers of the superhero genre. This analysis of superhero comics as Romance literature shows that the reverse is true--knowledge of the superhero romance has something to teach critics of traditional literature. Establishing the comic genre as a cousin to Arthurian myth, Spenser, and Shakespeare, it uses comics to inform readings of The Faerie Queene, The Tempest, Malory's Morte and more, while employing authors like Ben Johnson to help explain comics by Alan Moore, Jack Kirby, and Grant Morrison and characters like Iron Man, the Hulk, the X-Men, and the Justice League. Scholars of comics, medieval and Renaissance literature alike will find it appealing.

ThisÊwork on the Renaissance in Italy, of which I now give the last two volumes to the public, was designed and executed on the plan of an essay or analytical inquiry, rather than on that which is appropriate to a continuous history. Each of its four partsÑtheÊAge of the Despots, theRevival of Learning, theÊFine Arts, andÊItalian LiteratureÑstood in my mind for a section; each chapter for a paragraph; each paragraph for a sentence. At the same time, it was intended to make the first three parts subsidiary and introductory to the fourth, for which accordingly a wider space and a more minute method of treatment were reserved. The first volume was meant to explain the social and political conditions of Italy; the second to relate the exploration of the classical past which those conditions necessitated, and which determined the intellectual activity of the Italians; the third to exhibit the bias of this people toward figurative art, and briefly to touch upon its various manifestations; in order that, finally, a correct point of view might be obtained for judging of their national literature in its strength and limitations. Literature must always prove the surest guide to the investigator of a people's character at some decisiveÊepoch. To literature, therefore, I felt that the plan of my book allowed me to devote two volumes. The subject of my inquiry rendered the method I have described, not only natural but necessary. Yet there are special disadvantages, to which progressive history is not liable, in publishing a book of this sort by installments. Readers of the earlier parts cannot form a just conception of the scope and object of the whole. They cannot perceive the relation of its several sections to each other, or give the author credit for his exercise of judgment in the marshaling and development of topics. They criticise each portion independently, and desire a comprehensiveness in parts which would have been injurious to the total scheme. Furthermore, this kind of book sorely needs an Index, and its plan renders a general Index, such as will be found at the end of the last volume, more valuable than one made separately for each part. Ê

Isabella de' Medici's affair with her husband's cousin - and her very success as First Lady of Florence - led to her death at the hands of her husband at the age of just thirty-four. She left behind as her legacy a son who became the best of the Orsini Dukes. This title presents her story.

Why and how did Edmund Spenser employ fairy mythology in The Faerie Queene? In this book, Matthew Woodcock reasserts the importance of fairy mythology in this famous poem by demonstrating how Spenser places fairy at the very centre of his mythopoeic project. Woodcock argues that despite the continued invitations in the poem to deconstruct Gloriana, Spenser's identification of Queen Elizabeth I with the fairy queen figure is far more ambiguous than has previously been recognized. The poet is engaged both in constructing a mythological persona for the queen and in drawing attention to his own role as laureate and myth-maker. Spenser's elf-fashioning is therefore a vital part of his authorial self-fashioning. within the context of early modern conceptions and representations of fairy and discusses the representation of Elizabeth as the fairy queen in relation to the vast range of studies on Elizabethan myth-making.