The Introduction offers an analysis of the poem’s proem to offer a first example of the methodology of the book and of Statius’ sophisticated engagement with Ovid. A discussion of the historical context in which the poem was composed warns readers about the risks of interpreting the Thebaid only in the light of the anti-Domitianic writings of Tacitus, Suetonius, and Pliny, suggesting the importance of non-literary and material sources. A critical overview of the scholarly debate on the Thebaid and the exploration of ancient reading habits – including the consideration of attestations of Ovidian stories in frescoes and monuments – suggests that intertextuality can consist of interactions of meanings (potentially independent of verbal allusions). Furthermore, texts can engage in dialogue with the semantics of both textual and non-textual narratives. Accordingly, the introduction suggests that the study of the Thebaid’s poetics and politics (broadly understood) involves the exploration of how different kinds of intertextual and intermedial interplays shape the poem’s engagement with both past literary models and the contemporary realities of Flavian Rome.

Drawing on both Statius’s Thebaid and Boccaccio’s Teseida, The Knight’s Tale uncomfortably sutures the horrors of epic tragedy to the idealism of chivalric romance, inflecting both with the philosophical ambitions of Boethius’s Consolation. This chapter traces the modern engagement with the tale as a history of attempts to understand the tensions produced by its multiple sources, genres, and rhetorical registers, and explores how accounts of its form inflect and are inflected by accounts of its politics. Politics here, as in other Canterbury Tales, is as much a matter of gender and sexuality as it is of class, rule, and social order. Moreover, the problems posed by aesthetic and political form become problems of how to understand the relations among the text, its pilgrim narrator, and the author. Beginning with the high formalist moment of postwar criticism, the chapter follows the development of ideology critique and of feminist and psychoanalytic criticism, each of which remains attuned to earlier formalist questions. The Knight’s Tale that emerges from this history is a text of great aesthetic ambition, whose aims are as much reflected in its incoherences as in its formalist impulses.

Chapter 5 looks at funeral denial and perversion in Statius’ Thebaid. The discussion of these motifs in Statius’ poem focuses on Creon’s funeral abnegation decree at Thebaid 11.661-4. This point marks the official moment when death rites are denied, but the theme has been building steadily over the course of the epic. The chapter also considers a series of bizarre funeral perversions, particularly the funerals for the fallen Argive leaders, all of whom receive a warping of traditional rites. It examines also the role of women and their attempts to provide funerals for their loved ones, specifically Hypsipyle, Argia and Antigone, and the Argive women. The final section details Iris’ ‘preservation’ of the dead Argive leaders, and the strange case of Maeon’s corpse in book 3.

The chapter examines the systems of taxation, tributes, and donations that maintained the mission enterprise.In modern scholarship, studies continue to recycle old tropes of mendicant poverty and development projects. Departing from these analyses, this chapter examines the mission’s economic dependence on native tributes and forced labor systems.Arrangements between native rulers and missionaries constituted a colonial economy that sharply contradicted the mendicants’ self-image as ascetic hermits.The chapter begins by contrasting Spanish claims that the mission was financed through royal patronage with colonial records that demonstrate the myriad ways in which indigenous communities supported it with finances, goods, and labor.The chapter then examines the consequences of the missionaries’ dependence on native economies. Far from their imagined lives as desert hermits in a pagan land, friars lived in close proximity to indigenous towns and faced a plethora of temptations.This section examines numerous reports of misconduct by friars, as well as efforts by mendicant Orders to regulate material wealth.The missionaries’ material dependence on indigenous communities challenged ideals of poverty and chastity at the core of their identity.Thus, while indigenous people paid dearly for the mission with their labor, friars paid for it with their racked consciences.

This chapter examines the interdependent relationships between indigenous rulers and missionaries between 1530 and 1560. From its very beginnings, the mission in New Spain was a hybrid enterprise. Native territorial politics and everyday practices of governance largely determined the shape of mission organization. The chapter begins by examining the political foundation of the mission enterprise, which consisted of an expanding web of local native-missionary alliances.The mission was a vital factor in the geopolitical reshuffling of territorial power in post-conquest Mesoamerica, while indigenous territorial divisions served as the basis for the mission system of doctrinas (mission bases) and visitas (outlying mission churches). The chapter then examines the ways in which these alliances of missionaries and native governments adapted pre-conquest political and religious offices to the needs of the mission enterprise.In hundreds of doctrinas (mission bases), officials known collectively as the teopantlaca, or “church-people” – indigenous fiscales (church officers), alguaciles de doctrina (church constables), and cantores and trompeteros (singers and musicians) – oversaw the everyday experience of the mission. By adapting native hierarchical structures, territoriality, and officialdom to the mission enterprise, native rulers and missionaries furthered their respective efforts to reassert local indigenous authority and expand the mission’s doctrinal program.