The famous library of Alexandria, founded around 295 BCE by Ptolemaios I, housed the greatest collection of texts in the ancient world and was a fertile site of Hellenistic scholarship. Rudolf Blum’s landmark study, originally published in German in 1977, argues that Kallimachos of Kyrene was not only the second director of the Alexandrian library but also the inventor of two essential scholarly tools still in use to this day: the library catalog and the “biobibliographical” reference work. Kallimachos expanded the library’s inventory lists into volumes called the Pinakes, which extensively described and categorized each work and became in effect a Greek national bibliography and the source and paradigm for most later bibliographic lists of Greek literature. Though the Pinakes have not survived, Blum attempts a detailed reconstruction of Kallimachos’s inventories and catalogs based on a careful analysis of surviving sources, which are presented here in full translation.

Originally published in 1867, this book is a collection of songs of African-American slaves. A few of the songs were written after the emancipation, but all were inspired by slavery. The wild, sad strains tell, as the sufferers themselves could, of crushed hopes, keen sorrow, and a dull, daily misery, which covered them as hopelessly as the fog from the rice swamps. On the other hand, the words breathe a trusting faith in the life after, to which their eyes seem constantly turned.

An anthology of classical literature features more than three hundred pieces, representing the foundation of Western literature, as well as commentary that discusses the origins of Greek language, Homer, the fall of Rome, and more.

This set reprints volumes 1, 2 and 3 of James Bowen's A History of Western Education originally published by Methuen in the 1970s. Volume One: The Ancient World: Orient and Mediterranean 2000B.C - A.D. 1054 The volume traces the development of education in the ancient world from the first scribal cultures of Mesopotamia and Egypt to learning in the early Christian church. A detailed account is given of the acheivements of Greece in literacy, learning, philosophy and training for public life - achievements which were further developed in the Hellenistic Orient and incorporated by the Romans into their own highly organized educational system. This leads to the emergence of a specifically Christian ideal of education, the decline of secular learning in the West, and the preservation of learning both in Byzantium and in Western monasticism. Volume Two: Civilization of Europe: Sixth to Sixteenth Century Volume Two follows the growth and process of learning in Europe from its foundations in the Carolingian era through its evolution in medieval Europe - especially italy, France, Germany and England - to its expansion and refinement in the sixteenth century. Particular attention is paid to: * The role of medieval institutions of the cathedral and grammer schools and the university * The contribution of notable scholars of the age such as Abelard, Thomas Aquinas, Erasmus and Luther Volume Three: The Modern West: Europe and the New World The final volume covers the period of educational dissent, which became conspicuous in the early seventeenth century and reached crisis proportions in the late twentieth, when the dominant ideologies of progress and equality, generated at the beginning of the nineteenth century, were questioned for the first time on a widespread, popular scale.

The essays collected here explore the representation of contemporary cartographic knowledge within a variety of English Renaissance dramatic texts. Including a preface and introduction that contextualize English cartographic awareness in the late sixteenth century, Playing the Globe provides a wide-ranging exploration of the rich variety of mental maps that shaped England's attitudes toward itself and others and continues to affect the ways in which the Anglo-American world imagines itself.