In The Jeweled Style, Michael Roberts offers a new approach to the Latin poetry of late antiquity, one centering on an aesthetic quality common to both the literature and the art of the period—the polychrome patterning of words and phrases or of colors and shapes. In Roberts's view, the writer or artist of this period works as a jeweler, carefully setting compositional units in a geometric framework, consistently demonstrating a preference for effects of patterning over realistic representation, and for a unity situated at a higher level than the literal, historical sequence of the narrative. Roberts's introductory chapter is followed by an anthology of representative narrative and descriptive poetry from the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. Next, Roberts traces the use of "jewels" as a literary metaphor from the first century A.D. to late antiquity. He then compares the works of late antique literature to wall and floor mosaics, ivory diptychs, Christian sarcophagi, and contemporary styles of dress. Emphasizing that the poetry of this period is not uniform, he differentiates the main genres of Christian narrative poetry—biblical and hagiographical epic—from secular examples of the jeweled style, such as the poetry of Ausonius and Sidonius. Roberts concludes by examining the influence of late antique aesthetics on the medieval poetics of Matthew of Vendôme and Geoffrey of Vinsauf. Elegantly written and augmented by twenty-three illustration, The Jeweled Style will be welcomed by many readers, including Latinists and other classicists, medievalists and Renaissance scholars specializing in literature, Byzantinists, and art historians.

In The Space That Remains, Aaron Pelttari offers the first systematic study of the major fourth-century poets since Michael Robert's foundational The Jeweled Style. It is the first book to give equal attention to both Christian and Pagan poetry and the first to take seriously the issue of readership. As Pelttari shows, the period marked a turn towards forms of writing that privilege the reader's active involvement in shaping the meaning of the text. In the poetry of Ausonius, Claudian, and Prudentius we can see the increasing importance of distinctions between old and new, ancient and modern, forgotten and remembered. The strange traditionalism and verbalism of the day often concealed a desire for immediacy and presence. We can see these changes most clearly in the expectations placed upon readers. The space that remains is the space that the reader comes to inhabit, as would increasingly become the case in the literature of the Latin Middle Ages.

After centuries of near silence, Latin poetry underwent a renaissance in the late fourth and fifth centuries CE evidenced in the works of key figures such as Ausonius, Claudian, Prudentius, and Paulinus of Nola. This period of resurgence marked a milestone in the reception of the classics of late Republican and early imperial poetry. In Classicism and Christianity in Late Antique Latin Poetry, Philip Hardie explores the ways in which poets writing on non-Christian and Christian subjects used the classical traditions of Latin poetry to construct their relationship with Rome’s imperial past and present, and with the by now not-so-new belief system of the state religion, Christianity. The book pays particular attention to the themes of concord and discord, the "cosmic sense" of late antiquity, novelty and renouatio, paradox and miracle, and allegory. It is also a contribution to the ongoing discussion of whether there is an identifiably late antique poetics and a late antique practice of intertextuality. Not since Michael Robert's classic The Jeweled Style has a single book had so much to teach about the enduring power of Latin poetry in late antiquity.

The poetry of the late Roman world has a fascinating history. Sometimes an object of derision, sometimes an object of admiration, it has found numerous detractors and defenders among classicists and Latin literary critics. This volume explores the scholarly approaches to late Latin poetry that have developed over the last 40 years, and it seeks especially to develop, complement and challenge the seminal concept of the 'Jeweled Style' proposed by Michael Roberts in 1989. While Roberts's monograph has long been a vade mecum within the world of late antique literary studies, a critical reassessment of its validity as a concept is overdue. This volume invites established and emerging scholars from different research traditions to return to the influential conclusions put forward by Roberts. It asks them to examine the continued relevance of The Jeweled Style and to suggest new ways to engage it. In a joint effort, the nineteen chapters of this volume define and map the jeweled style, extending it to new genres, geographic regions, time periods and methodologies. Each contribution seeks to provide insightful analysis that integrates the last 30 years of scholarship while pursuing ambitious applications of the jeweled style within and beyond the world of late antiquity.

"Muqarnas" is sponsored by The Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts. "Muqarnas" 26 contains articles on a variety of topics that span and transcend the geographic and temporal boundaries that have traditionally defined the history of Islamic art and architecture. Contributors include Robert McChesney, Mattia Guidetti, Marcus Schadl, Christian Gruber, Katia Cytryn-Silverman, Doris Abouseif, Olga Bush, Emine Fetvaci, Moya Carey, Bernard O'Kane, Hadi Maktabi, Nadia Erzini and Stephen Vernoit.

With few exceptions, the scholarship on religion in late antiquity has emphasized its tendencies toward transcendence, abstraction, and spirit at the expense of matter. In The Corporeal Imagination, Patricia Cox Miller argues instead that ancient Christianity took a material turn between the fourth and seventh centuries. During this period, Miller contends, there occurred a major shift in the ways in which the human being was oriented in relation to the divine, a shift that reconfigured the relationship between materiality and meaning in a positive direction. The Corporeal Imagination is a groundbreaking investigation into the theological poetics of material substance in late ancient Christian texts. From hagiographies to literary descriptions of sacred paintings to treatises on relics and theurgy, Miller examines a wide variety of ancient texts to reveal how Christian writers increasingly described the matter of the world as invested with divine power. By appealing to the reader's sensory imagination, Christian texts endowed phenomena like relics, saints' bodies in hagiography, and saints' presence in icons with a visual and tactile presence. The book draws on a variety of contemporary theoretical models to elucidate the significance of all these materials in ancient religious life and imagination.

As part of the historicizing corpus of seventh-century Irish writing, the Lives framed the narrative of the early saints as an effective weapon in contemporary political and ecclesiastical conflicts. Cogitosus’s Life of Brigit, Muirchú’s and Tírechán’s accounts of Saint Patrick, and Adomnán’s Life of Columba created the understanding of the history of early Ireland that has endured to this day. How did the writers accomplish this through their literary choices? The authors of Irish saints’ Lives used the literary form of hagiography (Christian biography), miracle stories, and an elaborate rhetorical style to present the words and actions of their subjects. These Lives created a narrative of early Irish history that supported the political/ecclesiastical elites by showing that their power derived from the actions of their patron saints.