A product of the cathedral schools that played a foundational role in the so-called Twelfth-Century Renaissance, Alan of Lille was renowned for the vast learning which earned him …
Until the Renaissance, the work of Calcidius offered the medieval West almost the only direct access to Plato’s corpus not dispersed in fragments. In the 4th century CE, Calcidius …
Carmina Burana, literally “Songs from Beuern,” is named after the village where the manuscript was found. The songbook consists of nearly 250 poems, on subjects ranging from sex …
Beowulf is one of the finest works of vernacular literature from the European Middle Ages and as such is a fitting title to head the Old English family of texts published in the …
The Tria sunt, named for its opening words, was a widely used and highly ambitious book composed in England in the late fourteenth century during a revival of interest in the art …
The Old English poems attributed to Cynewulf, who flourished some time between the eighth and tenth centuries, are unusual because most vernacular poems in this period are …
Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were central to the educational system of Byzantium, yet the religion and culture of the Homeric epics—even the ancient Greek language itself—had become …
In the early 1140s, the Bavarian princess Bertha von Sulzbach arrived in Constantinople to marry the Byzantine emperor Manuel Komnenos. Wanting to learn more about her new …
The Parisiana poetria, first published around 1220, expounds the medieval theory of poetry (ars poetica) and summarizes early thirteenth-century thought about writing. While the …
An influential medieval allegorical interpretation of the Metamorphoses that uncovers the hidden moral truths of Ovid’s stories, translated into English for the first time.Written …
