Trauma is an inescapable condition of Chaucer's works. From the ravaging of Troy and the abandonment of Dido to the devastating aftereffects of sexual assault, Chaucer portrayed the most unsettling, searing aspects of human experience. While the term "trauma" was not part of Chaucer's vocabulary, the author was assuredly aware of its causes and ......
On May 4, 1380, Cecily Chaumpaigne filed a quitclaim with the Chancery in Westminster, releasing the poet Geoffrey Chaucer from any prosecution de raptu meo (on account of my rape). This legal document, lost for centuries, has haunted Chaucer studies since its rediscovery in 1873. Over the past 150 years since it reemerged, many Chaucer scholars ......
An exposition of Arabic literate culture In eleventh-century Cordoba, the celebrated poet Ibn Zaydun found himself jockeying for the affections of Walladah, accomplished poet and free-spirited daughter of an Umayyad caliph. Looking to embarrass a rival suitor, Ibn Zaydun mischievously wrote and publicized an eloquent, erudite, and searing ......
Ovid and the Metamorphosis of the Hymnic Tradition
The Metamorphoses, written by the Roman poet Ovid, has fascinated readers ever since it was written in the first century CE, and here Celia M. Campbell offers a bold new interpretive approach. Reasserting the significance of the ancient hymnic tradition, she argues that the first pentad of Ovid's Metamorphoses draws a programmatic strain of ......
Over the last few decades, the field of trauma studies has shed new light on biblical texts that deal with individual and collective catastrophe. In The Language of Trauma in the Psalms, Danilo Verde advances the conversation, moving beyond the emphasis on healing that prevails in most literary trauma studies. Using the lens of cognitive ......
With an Edition of Middle English and Middle Scots Pastourelles
Centering on the difficult and important subject of medieval rape culture, this book brings Middle English and Scots texts into conversation with contemporary discourses on sexual assault and the #MeToo movement. The book explores the topic in the late medieval lyric genre known as the pastourelle and in related literary works, including chivalric ......
In this first comprehensive reading of Juvenal's satires in more than fifty years, David H. J. Larmour deftly revises and sharpens our understanding of the second-century Roman writer who stands as the archetype for all later practitioners of the satirist's art. The enduring attraction of Juvenal's satires is twofold: they not only introduce the ......
Imperial Rome privileged the elite male citizen as one of sound mind and body, superior in all ways to women, noncitizens, and nonhumans. One of the markers of his superiority was the power of his voice, both literal (in terms of oratory and the legal capacity to represent himself and others) and metaphoric, as in the political power of having a ......
