In Ilias Latina. Text, Interpretation, and Reception, the contributors approach this short poem, whose appeal and importance have not been sufficiently appreciated, from a multitude of scholarly perspectives. The challenging synthesis of the different issues shows that both a new edition and a modern literary interpretation of the poem are needed. Particularly focusing in various ways on the technique of vertere, the papers concern four main issues: the different elements of the narration, such as macro- and microstructure, single Bauformen and motifs, characters and scenes; the intertextual allusions to Homer and the texts of the Roman poetic tradition; the literary genre, the explicitly metaliterary passages and the implicit narrative and poetic choices; the medieval reception of the Ilias Latina.

The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (OHCREL) is designed to offer a comprehensive investigation of the numerous and diverse ways in which literary texts of the classical world have stimulated responses and refashioning by English writers. Covering the full range of English literature from the early Middle Ages to the present day, OHCREL both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge new research, employing an international team of expert contributors for each of the five volumes. OHCREL endeavours to interrogate, rather than inertly reiterate, conventional assumptions about literary 'periods', the processes of canon-formation, and the relations between literary and non-literary discourse. It conceives of 'reception' as a complex process of dialogic exchange and, rather than offering large cultural generalizations, it engages in close critical analysis of literary texts. It explores in detail the ways in which English writers' engagement with classical literature casts as much light on the classical originals as it does on the English writers' own cultural context. This first volume, and fourth to appear in the series, covers the years c.800-1558, and surveys the reception and transformation of classical literary culture in England from the Anglo-Saxon period up to the Henrician era. Chapters on the classics in the medieval curriculum, the trivium and quadrivium, medieval libraries, and medieval mythography provide context for medieval reception. The reception of specific classical authors and traditions is represented in chapters on Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Statius, the matter of Troy, Boethius, moral philosophy, historiography, biblical epics, English learning in the twelfth century, and the role of antiquity in medieval alliterative poetry. The medieval section includes coverage of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, while the part of the volume dedicated to the later period explores early English humanism, humanist education, and libraries in the Henrician era, and includes chapters that focus on the classicism of Skelton, Douglas, Wyatt, and Surrey.

Based on the study of over 500 surviving manuscript school books, this comprehensive 2001 study of the curriculum of school education in medieval and Renaissance Italy contains some surprising conclusions. Robert Black's analysis finds that continuity and conservatism, not innovation, characterize medieval and Renaissance teaching. The study of classical texts in medieval Italian schools reached its height in the twelfth century; this was followed by a collapse in the thirteenth century, an effect on school teaching of the growth of university education. This collapse was only gradually reversed in the two centuries that followed: it was not until the later 1400s that humanists began to have a significant impact on education. Scholars of European history, of Renaissance studies, and of the history of education will find that this deeply researched and broad-ranging book challenges much inherited wisdom about education, humanism and the history of ideas.

The aim of the author of this book is to bring home not only to researchers, but to every kind of audience the repercussions of a literary topic that was an essential part of Classical education and, even more, a crucial subject in and outside the academic world. In ancient Greece and Rome, the Cycle of Troy was viewed as an essential compilation of information and educational models which was a vivid testimony throughout the history of Greek and Roman influence. Yet in the middle Ages, Trojan myths, just as with those concerning other characters like Hercules or Jason, were transformed into models of human behaviour, i.e. underwent the process of “moralization”. We say “Moralitee” to point out how Geoffrey Chaucer recreates those myths. Although we will extensively discuss how Chaucer recreates the Trojan myths in his works, we can anticipate what the reader will find. Chaucer manipulates his material from a multifold point of view: first of all, Chaucer was a man of his times, an unquiet mind and personality who always plays different games with that material. We might consider heroic the fact that Chaucer would pour out on his work the great background that the European writers (mainly Boccaccio, Dante, and Petrarch) supplied him (we will remember how difficult collecting information was in a period of vast lack of what we might call “media”). Come what may, he projects his wisdom to stress the most surmounting aspects of the formal characterization of the myths, and integrates them into the proper contexts of his works, as one of the key forces that the audience is expected to revive with the knowledge that it is supposed to own.

Meanings are realized at the point of reception and this volume intends to offer an in-depth discussion of some of the meanings associated with and raised by the figure of Telamonian Ajax at various, specifically contextualized, and yet somehow connectable ‘points of reception’. Part 1 looks at how, and from where, and with what effects, the epic and tragic figure of Ajax is constructed and re-defined in archaic and classical Greece. Part 2 moves on to Roman Ajax(es), evaluating how he is used in and by Latin literature as a tool for window-references and innovation, and for reflecting on national identity and cultural categories. Part 3 discusses various ways in which the myth of Ajax, especially in its Sophoclean version, has been translated into theatrical, psychological, and philosophical discussions. This is not an attempt to look for Ajax’s true nature (an ill-posed question in itself). Nor is it a claim to evaluate Ajax’s features as if they could be placed on a straight evolutionary line (they never can be). On the contrary, the volume provides a multiform and interconnected ensemble of relevant patterns, always particularly situated, and constantly changing.

"The present volume [3] is the first to appear of the five that will comprise The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (henceforth OHCREL). Each volume of OHCREL will have its own editor or team of editors"--Preface.

Saint Augustine famously “wept for Dido, who killed herself by the sword,” and many later medieval schoolboys were taught to respond in similarly emotional ways to the pain of female characters in Virgil’s Aeneid and other classical texts. In Weeping for Dido, Marjorie Curry Woods takes readers into the medieval classroom, where boys identified with Dido, where teachers turned an unfinished classical poem into a bildungsroman about young Achilles, and where students not only studied but performed classical works. Woods opens the classroom door by examining teachers’ notes and marginal commentary in manuscripts of the Aeneid and two short verse narratives: the Achilleid of Statius and the Ilias latina, a Latin epitome of Homer’s Iliad. She focuses on interlinear glosses—individual words and short phrases written above lines of text that elucidate grammar, syntax, and vocabulary, but that also indicate how students engaged with the feelings and motivations of characters. Interlinear and marginal glosses, which were the foundation of the medieval classroom study of classical literature, reveal that in learning the Aeneid, boys studied and empathized with the feelings of female characters; that the unfinished Achilleid was restructured into a complete narrative showing young Achilles mirroring his mentors, including his mother, Thetis; and that the Ilias latina offered boys a condensed version of the Iliad focusing on the deaths of young men. Manuscript evidence even indicates how specific passages could be performed. The result is a groundbreaking study that provides a surprising new picture of medieval education and writes a new chapter in the reception history of classical literature.