Published: 02/28/2023
In the winter of 476 AD, the Ostrogoths, hungry and exhausted from wandering for months along the barren confines of the Byzantine Empire, write to Emperor Zeno in Constantinople requesting permission to enter the walled city of Epidaurum and just kinda crash and charge their phones. Closer to home, Orpheus walks Eurydice through a suburban[…]
Imprint: Tangent
Published: 07/27/2023
Can attending to poetic form help us imagine a radical politics and bridge the gap between pressing contemporary political concerns and an ancient literature that often seems steeped in dynamics of oppression? The corpus of the fifth-century Athenian playwright Aristophanes includes some of the funniest yet most disturbing comedies of Western literature. His work’s anarchic[…]
Imprint: Gracchi Books
Published: 05/04/2023
Social and Intellectual Networking in the Early Middle Ages seeks to expand our understanding of early medieval connectivity by interrogating social and intellectual collaborations, competitions, and communications among persons, places, things, and ideas in the European and Mediterranean West during the second half of the first millennium CE. In so doing, its contributors explore the[…]
Imprint: Brainstorm Books
Published: 04/20/2023
Chaucer’s Comic Providence presents readings of five of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales that dramatize sexual division and the lack of rapport between the sexes. These readings are founded on the psychoanalytic thinking of Jacques Lacan in his rereading of Freud and are motivated by Thormann’s conviction that Chaucer understood what psychoanalysis would come to study as[…]
Imprint: Gracchi Books
Published: 02/17/2022
The establishment of Christianity in the late- and post-Roman world caused an economic as well as a religious revolution, but while a great deal of attention has been paid to the religious developments of the period, the impact of the establishment of the Church on the economy has attracted remarkably little attention. The Christian Economy[…]
Imprint: Gracchi Books
Published: 08/18/2022
In his Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (circa 731 CE), Bede says that he will write his account of the past of the English following only vera lex historiae (“the true law of history”). Whether explicitly or implicitly, historians narrate the past according to conceptions of what constitutes historical truth that emerge in the use of[…]
Published: 12/17/2020
The Old Icelandic text The Saga of Þórður kakali survives today as part of the fourteenth-century compilation The Saga of the Sturlungar. In extant form, The Saga of Þórður kakali is a biography of Þórður kakali Sighvatsson (c.1210–56)—chieftain, royal retainer, and sheriff—and covers the periods 1242–50 and 1254–56, providing an interesting view of power politics[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 06/03/2021
This is the first edition of A Mirroure of Myserie (1557), a poem by the Catholic propagandist Miles Hogarde and probably presented to Queen Mary. Cast as a dream vision, this combative dialogue draws on William Langland’s widely circulating medieval poem The Vision of Piers Plowman and offers a critical assessment of sixteenth-century morality in[…]