A superb volume, fully worthy of these famous but often misunderstood poems. P. G. Walsh's unmatched erudition in Latin literature furnishes lucid grammatical explanations, incisive analysis of goliardic literary values and technique, and illuminating references to ancient and medieval parallels. His prose translations make the poems accessible also to those with little or no Latin. Janet M. Martin, Princeton University

With the Spanish conquest of Islamic Granada and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, the year 1492 marks the exile from Europe of crucial strands of medieval culture. It also becomes a symbolic marker for the expulsion of a diversity in language and grammar that was disturbing to the Renaissance sensibility of purity and stability. In rewriting Columbus's narrative of his voyage of that year, Renaissance historians rewrote history, as was often their practice, to purge it of an offending vulgarity. The cultural fragments left behind following this exile form the core of Shards of Love, as María Rosa Menocal confronts the difficulty of writing their history. It is in exile that Menocal locates the founding conditions for philology--as a discipline that loves origins--and for the genre of love songs that philology reveres. She crosses the boundaries, both temporal and geographical, of 1492 to recover the "original" medieval culture, with its Mediterranean mix of European, Arabic, and Hebrew poetics. The result is a form of literary history more lyrical than narrative and, Menocal persuasively demonstrates, more appropriate to the Middle Ages than to the revisionary legacy of the Renaissance. In discussions ranging from Eric Clapton's adaption of Nizami's Layla and Majnun, to the uncanny ties between Jim Morrison and Petrarch, Shards of Love deepens our sense of how the Middle Ages is tied to our own age as it expands the history and meaning of what we call Romance philology.

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE A beautiful, comprehensive volume of Dylan’s lyrics, from the beginning of his career through the present day—with the songwriter’s edits to dozens of songs, appearing here for the first time. Bob Dylan is one of the most important songwriters of our time, responsible for modern classics such as “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and “The Times They Are a-Changin’.” The Lyrics is a comprehensive and definitive collection of Dylan’s most recent writing as well as the early works that are such an essential part of the canon. Well known for changing the lyrics to even his best-loved songs, Dylan has edited dozens of songs for this volume, making The Lyrics a must-read for everyone from fanatics to casual fans.

Musical sounds are some of the most mobile human elements, crossing national, cultural, and regional boundaries at an ever-increasing pace in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Whole musical products travel easily, though not necessarily intact, via musicians, CDs (and earlier, cassettes), satellite broadcasting, digital downloads, and streaming. The introductory chapter by the volume editors develops two framing metaphors: “traveling musics” and “making waves.” The wave-making metaphor illuminates the ways that traveling musics traverse flows of globalization and migration, initiating change, and generating energy of their own. Each of the nine contributors further examines music—its songs, makers, instruments, aurality, aesthetics, and images—as it crosses oceans, continents, and islands. In the process of landing in new homes, music interacts with older established cultural environments, sometimes in unexpected ways and with surprising results. They see these traveling musics in Hawai‘i, Asia, and the Pacific as “making waves”—that is, not only riding flows of globalism, but instigating ripples of change. What is the nature of those ripples? What constitutes some of the infrastructure for the wave itself? What are some of the effects of music landing on, transported to, or appropriated from distant shores? How does the Hawai‘i-Asia-Pacific context itself shape and get shaped by these musical waves? The two poetic and evocative metaphors allow the individual contributors great leeway in charting their own course while simultaneously referring back to the influence of their mentor and colleague Ricardo D. Trimillos, whom they identify as “the wave maker.” The volume attempts to position music as at once ritual and entertainment, esoteric and exoteric, tradition and creativity, within the cultural geographies of Hawai‘i, Asia, and the Pacific. In doing so, they situate music at the very core of global human endeavors.

In Lyric Tactics, Ingrid Nelson argues that the lyric poetry of later medieval England is a distinct genre defined not by its poetic features—rhyme, meter, and stanza forms—but by its modes of writing and performance, which are ad hoc, improvisatory, and situational.