Search

The Old English poem in The Exeter Book titled The Wife's Lament is about longing and loneliness; the woman speaking in the poem longs for her absent husband who has sent her to live in a "cave under an oak tree". The husband's attitude toward his wife is a major point of controversy among commentators on the poem: has he sent her there as a punishment or for her protection? This essay argues that he loves her and seeks to protect her in his absence. The argument supporting this view addresses the following three topics: the reason he must leave and his brooding silence preceding that departure, the culture of warrior oaths, and the nature of the "cave" where the speaker is located. The first two discussions assess and reframe previous scholarship, while the discussion of the speaker's location introduces a new area of research, the archaeology of early medieval rock-cut buildings. Finding that the poet might imagine the Wife inhabiting such a constructed building invites us to think about her, her husband, the poem, and even the Exeter Book itself within a new and interesting real-world context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on literary translation pedagogy in the U.S. Topics discussed include literary translation toward professionalization, the Presidential Forum and the conference "The Tasks of Translation in the Twenty-First Century" and the liquid-modernity era's innovative ways of disseminating literature such as the mass digitization of books and university libraries and the immediate availability of digitized information.

In the Beowulf -manuscript, the Old English Wonders of the East and Letter of Alexander to Aristotle interrogate how knowledge of cultural 'others' is produced in the context of empire and invasion. This commentary comes to fruition in the Letter, which uses the verb ongitan to describe Alexander's dual desire to understand and conquer Indian 'wonders'. As a vernacular translation that narrates histories of ancient Greek empire accessed via Latin sources, the Letter both anticipates and complicates later iterations of postcolonial critique, offering insight into the unique historical positioning of Anglo-Saxon readers, writers, and the global imagination they exercise [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the role that animals play in Della Porta's method of physiognomics. It claims that Della Porta created his own, original, method by appropriating, and yet selectively adapting Aristotelian and pseudo-Aristotelian sources. This has not been adequately reconstructed before in previous studies on Della Porta. I trace, in two steps, the conceptual trajectory of Della Porta's physiognomics, from human psychology to animal psychology, and ultimately from psychology to ethics. In the first step, I show how Della Porta substantially adapts the physiognomic principle of the body-soul relationship as found in the pseudo-Aristotelian Physiognomonica. In the second, I demonstrate that the real aim of Della Porta's physiognomics is a practical one, namely understanding how to live a good life, and I explain why he refers to Aristotle in order to ground this conception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The variety of scholarly approaches to the Middle High German poem Das Nibelungenlied has generated an especially wide range of conflicting analyses of the complex figure of Hagen. This essay argues that Hagen's relationship to Siegfried can be treated as an example of the courtly rivalry motif, a medieval narrative structure whose main features are outlined through a comparison of the depictions of rivalry in three contemporary Middle High German works (Herzog Ernst B, Wolfdietrich A and Tristan). Through the use of this narrative device, the poet problematizes the form of loyalty (MHG triuwe) that leads Hagen to kill Siegfried while using Hagen's later interactions with Rüdiger to present the audience with an alternative definition of loyalty. Viewing Hagen's character in relation to the problem of loyalty conflict can thus help reconcile the positive and negative aspects of his character while simultaneously shedding new light on the thematic structure of the Nibelungenlied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the role of werewolves as monsters in the writings of the 12th century German Pietist (Hasidei Ashkenaz) Jewish moralists and theologians, especially Rabbi Judah the Pious of Speyer and Rabbi Eleazar of Worms. Topics include the interpretation of the serpent in the biblical book Genesis, the notion of the biblical figure Benjamin as a werewolf, and Christian comparisons of the incarnation of religious figure Jesus Christ to a werewolf.

The article informs about the depiction of lycanthropic trials, human-werewolf encounters and transformations by Renaissance humanist in particular woodcut artists and engravers during the Renaissance. Topics discussed include the woodcut by painter Lucas Cranach the Elder depicting a werewolf devouring his prey, illustration of werewolves in "Topographia Hibernica" by Gerald of Wales and the book "Metamorphosis and Identity" by Caroline Walker Bynum which neglects such transformation.

The Carmina Burana have too easily fallen into stifling categories of interpretation, treating them as exclusively poems by students, by learned scholars, or by minstrels who demand our respect. In reality, as this paper illustrates, they represent a very dense corpus of songs in Latin and in a mixtures of Latin and Middle High German in which highly educated intellects reflect upon the wide range of everyday themes, interests, concerns, and desires common at that time, including sexuality, drinking, entertainment, and music. But at closer analysis we also discover a plethora of critical songs in which the loss of ethics, morality, and social norms both at court and in the church are sardonically attacked and ridiculed. Although the poets usually resort to the norms and models of ancient-classical and medieval courtly poetry, they regularly transgress those and present drastically opposite perspectives. In this process they also reveal the extent to which they actually closely interacted with vernacular literature. Laughter is often the name of the game, but it is not simply light and untroubled comic that finds expression here. This article demonstrates the extent to which the poets of the Carmina Burana actually interacted in a very intensive fashion with the learned literary traditions and the standard ideals of courtly love, undermining the common pretenses of a peaceful, harmonious, and honorable courtly society and of a reputable clergy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The portrait of Scyld which opens the Old English epic poem Beowulf constitutes the first panel of a diptych which will be completed with the portrait of the hero. As may be substantiated from the poem itself and from other poems within the Old English poetic corpus and Latin works well known to the Anglo-Saxons, the "Scyld Prologue" does not imply that the present poem is of the same type as those poems to which it refers, nor does it set the ethical tone of Beowulf as a whole. The "Prologue" describes a particular type of kingship, and, as the poet tells us, no-one can know the fate of a pagan who lives according to this old heroic ethos. However, the poem is designed specifically to demonstrate the fate of a pagan who follows quite different principles, and in this case the poet does not declare his ignorance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]