A.E. Housman (1859-1936) was a man of many apparent contradictions, most of which remain unresolved 150 years after his birth. At once a deeply emotive lyric poet and a precise and dedicated classical scholar, he achieved fame in both of these diverse disciplines. Although his poetic legacy has received much scholarly analysis, and yet more attention has been devoted to reconstructing his private life, no previous work has focused on Housman the classical scholar; yet it is upon scholarship that Housman most wished to leave his mark. This timely collection of papers by leading scholars reassesses the breadth and significance of Housman's contribution to classical scholarship in both his published and unpublished writings, and discusses how his mantle has been passed on to later generations of classicists.

Glossaries are one of the most important sources for our knowledge of early medieval schools, for they provide an accurate records of what texts were studied and how they were understood. But they are also very difficult to access: countless glossaries lie unpublished in manuscript, the relations between them are unknown, and their origins are obscure. The most important contribution to solving these problems was made by Wallace Martin Lindsay (1858-1937), one of the greatest classical scholars ever produced in the British Isles, who in a pioneering series of articles identified the principal glossaries and clarified their relationships; he subsequently oversaw their publication in Glossaria Latina. So comprehensive was Lindsay's work that the subject virtually stood still for half a century; but recent advances in paleography and Insular Latin studies have drawn scholarly attention to glossaries once again. Any future work on glossaries must be based on Lindsay's pioneering articles; to facilitate such work, these articles have been provided with comprehensive indices of the Latin lemmata and sources of the glossaries, together with an account of recent work on medieval glossaries.

This impressive survey covers the early history of Ireland from the coming of Christianity to the Norman settlement. Within a broad political framework it explores the nature of Irish society, the spiritual and secular roles of the Church and the extraordinary flowering of Irish culture in the period. Other major themes are Ireland's relations with Britain and continental Europe, the beginnings of Irish feudalism, and the impact of the Viking and Norman invaders. The expanded second edition has been fully updated to take into account the most recent research in the history of Ireland in the early middle ages, including Ireland’s relations with the Later Roman Empire, advances and discoveries in archaeology, and Church Reform in the 11th and 12th centuries. A new opening chapter on early Irish primary sources introduces students to the key written sources that inform our picture of early medieval Ireland, including annals, genealogies and laws. The social, political, religious, legal and institutional background provides the context against which Dáibhí Ó Cróinín describes Ireland’s transformation from a tribal society to a feudal state. It is essential reading for student and specialist alike.

When did fairy tales begin? What qualifies as a fairy tale? Is a true fairy tale oral or literary? Or is a fairy tale determined not by style but by content? To answer these and other questions, Jan M. Ziolkowski not only provides a comprehensive overview of the theoretical debates about fairy tale origins but includes an extensive discussion of the relationship of the fairy tale to both the written and oral sources. Ziolkowski offers interpretations of a sampling of the tales in order to sketch the complex connections that existed in the Middle Ages between oral folktales and their written equivalents, the variety of uses to which the writers applied the stories, and the diverse relationships between the medieval texts and the expressions of the same tales in the "classic" fairy tale collections of the nineteenth century. In so doing, Ziolkowski explores stories that survive in both versions associated with, on the one hand, such standards of the nineteenth-century fairy tale as the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and Carlo Collodi and, on the other, medieval Latin, demonstrating that the literary fairy tale owes a great debt to the Latin literature of the medieval period. Jan M. Ziolkowski is the Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Medieval Latin at Harvard University.