The concept goddess Natura -- one most of the of the significant allegorical figures of medieval Latin and vernacular poetry -- drew upon many strands of classical and Christian thought, from Plato's Timaeus to Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy. In what is perhaps the best history of the goddess Natura, George Economou provides a full-length study of her philosophical background and the literary traditions that contributed to her image. Economou's work focuses on the renaissance of the twelfth century, when a new kind of allegory appeared that celebrated and explored the nature of the...

The concept of the Goddess Natura - one of the most significant allegorical figures in Medieval Latin and vernacular poetry - drew upon many strands of classical and Christian thought, from Plato's Timaeus to Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy. In this history of the Goddess Natura, Economou provides a full-length study of her philosophical background and the literary traditions that contributed to her image. He focuses on the Renaissance of the 12th century, when a new kind of allegory appeared that celebrated and explored the nature of the cosmos. He analyses the central role that Natura...

Few works have shaped a national literature as thoroughly as the Poem of the Cid has shaped the Spanish literary tradition. Tracing the life of the eleventh-century military commander Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, called El Cid (from the Arabic Sayyidi, "My Lord"), this medieval epic describes a series of events surrounding his exile. The text of the poem survives in only one early-thirteenth-century manuscript copied by a single scribe, yet centuries later the figure of the Cid still was celebrated in the Spanish popular ballad tradition. Today almost every theme that characterizes Spanish...

This book contains 162 poems: the 154 canonical Collected Poems, presented by year and within each year's order of composition and/or first printing, plus seven of the Uncollected Poems interspersed chronologically among them. Only one of his rejected, early poems has been included, 'Ode and Elegy of the Street, ' used here as a kind of overture to the collection

Partly an addendum to George Economou's versions of the canonical Cavafy poems published by Shearsman in 2013 - in that this book includes completed versions of the master's unfinished poems- this volume also includes a number of Economou's own uncollected poems and translations, giving us a picture of both poet and translator, as well as a shadowy image of Cavafy himself.

It was out of medieval Provence Proensa that the ethos of courtly love emerged, and it was in the poetry of the Provencal troubadours that it found its perfect expression. Their poetry was also a central inspiration for Dante and his Italian contemporaries, propagators of the modern vernacular lyric, and seven centuries later it was no less important to the modernist Ezra Pound. These poems, a source to which poetry has returned again and again in search of renewal, are subtle, startling, earthy, erotic, and supremely musical.
The poet Paul Blackburn studied and translated the troubadours...