A major reinterpretation of Horace's famous literary manual For two millennia, the Ars Poetica (Art of Poetry), the 476-line literary treatise in verse with which Horace closed his career, has served as a paradigmatic manual for writers. Rarely has it been considered as a poem in its own right, or else it has been disparaged as a great poet's baffling outlier. Here, Jennifer Ferriss-Hill for the first time fully reintegrates the Ars Poetica into Horace's oeuvre, reading the poem as a coherent, complete, and exceptional literary artifact intimately linked with the larger themes pervading his work. Arguing that the poem can be interpreted as a manual on how to live masquerading as a handbook on poetry, Ferriss-Hill traces its key themes to show that they extend beyond poetry to encompass friendship, laughter, intergenerational relationships, and human endeavor. If the poem is read for how it expresses itself, moreover, it emerges as an exemplum of art in which judicious repetitions of words and ideas join disparate parts into a seamless whole that nevertheless lends itself to being remade upon every reading. Establishing the Ars Poetica as a logical evolution of Horace's work, this book promises to inspire a long overdue reconsideration of a hugely influential yet misunderstood poem.

"Vril naturally signifies the height of dominion attained by cultivation of man's latent power ... it expresses, with precision, nerve-energy and will-force combined in the developed individual."The Art of Living is Volume 1 of Arthur Lovell's masterful Ars Vivendi series. Lovell was a founding member of the turn-of-the-century Vril-ya Club, whose members sought to cultivate and master the mysterious energy of Vril. "The Vril-ya maintain a perpetual calmness of outward demeanour, with the inborn consciousness of superior power."Originally published in the 1890s.

From Latin humanists to popular writers, Italian Renaissance culture spawned a lively debate on vocational choice and the nature of profession. In The Culture of Profession in Late Renaissance Italy, George W. McClure examines the turn this debate took in the second half of the Renaissance, when the learned 'praise and rebuke' of profession began to be complemented with more popular forms of discourse, and when less learned vocations made their voice heard. Focusing primarily on sources assembled and published in the sixteenth century, McClure's study explores professional themes in comic, festive, and popular print culture. A pivotal figure is Tomaso Garzoni, a monk whose popular encyclopedia, Universal Piazza of all the Professions of the World, was published in 1585. A funnel for earlier traditions and an influence on later ones, this massive compendium treated over 150 categories of profession - juxtaposing the world of philosophers and poets, lawyers and physicians, merchants and artisans, teachers and printers, cooks and chimneysweeps, prostitutes and procurers. If the conventional view is that Italian Renaissance society generally grew more aristocratic in the later period, this and other sources reveal a professional ethos more democratic in nature and bespeak the full cultural discovery of the middling and lowly professions in the late Renaissance.

The study of health care brings one into contact with many disciplines and perspectives, including those of the provider and the patient. There are also multiple academic lenses through which one can view health, illness and disease. This book brings together scholars from around the world who are interested in developing new conversations intended to situate health in broader social and cultural contexts. This book is the outcome of the second global conference on "Making Sense of: Health, Illness and Disease," held at St Hilda's College, Oxford, in July 2003. The selected papers pursue a range of topics and incorporate perspectives from the humanities, social sciences and clinical sciences. This volume will be of interest to researchers and health care practitioners who wish to gain insight into other ways of understanding health, illness and disease.