This is the third and final volume of a series of books devoted to design of Rabelais's Pantagrueline epics. It completes the project begun in The Design of Rabelais's Pantagruel and continued in The Design of Rabelais's Tiers Livre de Pantagruel. Its subject is Rabelais's complete work, the last of the three epics of wich Pantagruel is the hero. As in the two preceding books, the purpose here has been to discover the coherence of both form and meaning in a work usually assumed to be fragm...

This book brings together new essays by leading cultural critics who have been influenced by the groundbreaking scholarship of Richard Helgerson. The original essays penned for this anthology evince the ongoing impact of Helgerson’s work in major critical debates including national identity, literary careerism, and studies of form. Analyzing not only early modern but also medieval literary texts, the pieces that comprise Essays in Memory of Richard Helgerson: Laureations respond to both He...

"Here is the first full translation into English of one of the twentieth century's few undoubted classics of history." — The Washington Post Book WorldThe Autumn of the Middle Ages is Johan Huizinga's classic portrait of life, thought, and art in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century France and the Netherlands. Few who have read this book in English realize that The Waning of the Middle Ages, the only previous transl...

More than half a century after its translation into English, Erich Auerbach's Mimesis remains a masterpiece of literary criticism. A brilliant display of erudition, wit, and wisdom, his exploration of how great European writers from Homer to Virginia Woolf depicted reality has taught generations how to read Western literature. This new expanded edition includes a substantial essay in introduction by Edward Said as well as an essay, never before translated into English, in which Auerbach re...

Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man is a dialogue written by the Marquis de Sade while incarcerated in 1782, expressing his atheism by having the dying libertine convince the priest of the mistakes of a pious life. Excerpted from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The Waning of the Middle Ages by Johan Huizinga presents a richly detailed examination of European society in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, illuminating the profound cultural, social, and religious currents that shaped a transitional period. In this masterful study, Huizinga focuses on the powerful interplay between spiritual devotion, chivalric ideals, and evolving artistic sensibilities. He reveals a world marked by heightened emotions, where codes of honor, courtly expressions...

Until now the advent of Western romantic love has been seen as a liberation from—or antidote to—ten centuries of misogyny. In this major contribution to gender studies, R. Howard Bloch demonstrates how similar the ubiquitous antifeminism of medieval times and the romantic idealization of woman actually are.Through analyses of a broad range of patristic and medieval texts, Bloch explores the Christian construction of gender in which the flesh is feminized, the feminine is aestheticiz...

CONTENTSINTRODUCTIONSources—Amira’s distinction between retributive and preventive processes—Addosio’s incorrect designation of the latter as civil suits—Inconsistent attitude of the Church in excommunicating animals—Causal relation of crime to demoniacal possession—Squatter sovereignty of devils—Aura corrumpens—Diabolical infestation and lack of ventilation—“Bewitched kine”—Greek furies and Christian demons—Homicidal bees, laying cocks and crowing hens—Theory of the personi...

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

This is a shortened reworking of the 2006 biography Marguerite de Navarre, made more accessible here without the scholarly trappings.

In "The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals," E. P. Evans presents a provocative exploration of the historical and legal frameworks surrounding the prosecution of non-human animals in various societies, particularly during the medieval period. This remarkable scholarly work employs a meticulous blend of legal history, anthropological analysis, and narrative vignettes to illustrate how animals, from mice to elephants, were once subjected to formal trials and, in some inst...

An overview of French literature as it evolved from the Middle Ages to the mid-twentieth century.In this compact yet wide-ranging volume, the many aspects of French literature and the different tendencies of successive schools are shown in the light of contemporaneous political and artistic developments.A Concise Survey of French Literature explores the relationship between literature and the evolution of French thought, deeply concerned, as it is,...