Evocations of Classical Greece and Rome pervade Robert Lowell’s entire oeuvre. His fascination with Latin literature in particular shaped his own poetry. The density and involved syntax of Virgil and Propertius are echoed in the crabbed and tortured involutions of Lowell’s earlier poetry. His confessional verse is in part a response to Catullan frankness. His view of America as declining from republic into empire was colored by the historiography of Suetonius and Tacitus, in whose portraits of imperial tyrants Lowell found a frame for depicting the darker elements of his own character. He essayed many (usually very free) translations or versions of Greek and Roman poems, often with autobiographical inflections. A number of “original” poems can be shown to have originated as translations from Catullus, Virgil, Propertius, or Horace. In contrast with his almost obsessive engagement with Roman literature, Lowell’s engagement with Greek was less extensive, often mediated through later European literature, and (notably in his versions of Aeschylus) less vivid.

This chapter deals with the fornaldarsögur (sagas of olden times), defined as legendary sagas about events in Nordic countries before the settlement of Iceland. It sets out the evidence of their popularity and describes the extent of their geographical settings. After noting their stylistic similarities to Íslendingasögur, the discussion moves on to place them within the larger European and heroic tradition, outlining the material they share with Old English and Middle High German literature and their links to eddic and skaldic verse. The influences of French courtly literature, religious literature and classical sources are explored. The folkloric dimension of the fornaldarsögur is pointed out, and the possibility of classifying the sagas as generic hybrids is suggested. Next the transmission of fornaldarsögur is discussed, followed by a reassessment of how the corpus might be divided into subgroups. The chapter then discusses possible composition dates and provides an analysis of the emergence of the genre, including the influence of Saxo’s Gesta Danorum. It ends with a discussion of fantastical narrative elements, which led to the label lygisögur (‘lying sagas’).

John of Garland, Alexander Neckam and Roger Bacon were three great writers of the thirteenth century who all wrote on various aspects of Latin language and culture, and of the importance of, and ways of, learning Latin. Garland and Neckam wrote imaginative lexicographical works, teaching Latin words by reference to everyday life and vernacular words. Roger Bacon wrote many learned works on numerous subjects and believed in the necessity of learning foreign languages, primarly Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Arabic in order to study the Bible and sciences.

While Kurdish classical poetry has a long history of many centuries, the modern Kurdish narrative discourse, that is, the Kurdish novel and short story, rises in the early decades of the twentieth century. Reviewing the life of some of the most influential Kurdish poets shows that they usually crossed the borders between the different parts of Kurdistan within the frame of the Ottoman and Iranian empires. These poets mainly served the Kurdish ethnic awareness and literary heritage. Having been deprived of a Kurdish nation-state, modern Kurdish narrative discourse encounters a dilemma as far as the national setting of its narratives is considered. Contrary to the earlier Kurdish poets who could wander to different parts of Kurdistan, the modern Kurdish novelists provide their imaginary characters with such an opportunity of crossing the strictly defined national borders of the modern nation-states in which the Kurds live. These characters, suffering from the lack of a defined national identity and a state of their own, challenge the borders between various parts of Kurdistan by crossing them. The wandering feature of the classical poets and the imaginary communities of the Kurdish novelists are among the distinguishing characteristics of the Kurdish literature in the past and the modern era.

This chapter explores the idea of the gift found in the classical writers and philosophers most widely read in central medieval Europe. It explores the explicit philosophical and moral treatments of generosity found in Seneca’s De beneficiis and Cicero’s De officiis, as well as the role played by gifts in literature, from Virgil’s Aeneid to the poems of Ovid. The chapter concludes by looking at how classical ideas about generosity were taken up by early Christian writers.

This chapter explores how classical ideas of the gift were utilised by medieval writers. The chapter focuses on three particularly influential writers from medieval England active across a range of genres: John of Salisbury, William of Malmesbury and Matthew Paris. The chapter shows that these writers were highly familiar with classical ideas of the gift and drew extensively upon them in shaping their own writings.

Chapter 4 investigates how classical ideals of generosity were utilised by writers of saints’ lives in twelfth- and thirteenth-century England. It focuses on the case of Thomas Becket’s literary afterlife and the ways in which hagiographers sought to reframe his reputation for largesse in a spiritual direction. The chapter concludes by looking at the influence of this model on the saints’ lives of thirteenth-century England.