Theodore had come from Tarsus via Rome to become archbishop of Canterbury in the 660s. Bringing a great deal of knowledge with him, he had a great influence on British culture and learning, particularly that of the Church, and on ecclesiastical matters, after the reintroduction of Christianity into southern Britain. Here an excerpt is taken from a set of notes on Biblical interpretation, together with a poem in octosyllabics written for a fellow bishop.

Chapter Eleven presents Romanticism as a nationalist phenomenon. After defining Romantic nationalism, it reviews three intersecting phenomena central not only to European Romanticism but also to nationalism: the linguistic revolution, the spread of idealism, and the rise of historicist dialectics. In each case, the author shows how these Romantic principles spread transnationally across various media, influencing political thought and emerging nationalisms. The wide-ranging chapter addresses France’s revolutionary nationalism, recuperated under the Restoration, and even more importantly the German nationalism that arose in reaction to French hegemony, but also touches on other Northern, Central and Eastern-European nations that have so far received little coverage in the volume, including, among others, Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Ireland, the Netherlands, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, and Albania. Its looks at the influence of philology on folklore, and on other literary genres such as the national epic, the patriotic hymn, and the historical novel, as well as the other arts, including music, architecture, and painting. Leerssen argues that Jacob Grimm and his teacher, the legal scholar Carl von Savigny, played central roles in the development of Romantic nationalism and of the notion of Volksgeist.

This chapter aims at the sort of overview that the editors of ANRW then encouraged, and brings together the place of poetry in sophists’ education; an account of the many various poetic genres in which sophists composed, with citation of what we have from the only one of these genres to have survived, epigram; and epigrams on sophists composed by others.

This chapter offers a short sketch of poetic output with special reference to the Roman provinces Achaea and Asia, and with an eye on how far we can differentiate ‘professional’ poets from virtuoso amateurs.

Chapter 4 consists of an introduction to the discourses and ideologies of patronage and benefaction and to the ways in which they are appropriated throughout the Apocalypse. Across ancient Mediterranean societies, one of the primary functions of the king consisted of distributing benefits to subjects, material and otherwise, in order to establish loyalty amongst subjects as well as power that accrued therefrom, a pattern which is best understood within broader systems of patronage and benefaction. A survey of the general contours of personal, imperial, and divine patronage and benefaction reveal how some of the most basic discursive strategies, attending socio-cultural-economic realities, and underlying ethical frameworks not only appear in Revelation but constitute the primary means of depicting the relationship between God, Lamb, and the followers thereof. In sum, Revelation depicts the Lamb as a royal benefactor who dispenses divine benefits on behalf of God.

A gift of a patron necessitated a response on the part of the recipient, which most often took the form of loyalty and other honors befitting the gift. Especially magnanimous benefactions were considered “divine” and compelled “divine” honors, including festivals, processions, priesthoods, crowns, and hymns. Chapter 5 presents a survey of the honors-for-benefits system inherent in systems of patronage and benefaction in the ancient Mediterranean world, with attention to the varieties of “divine” rewards requited for “divine” gifts, including especially divine hymns. This survey contextualizes the divine honors requitted to the Lamb, namely, allegiance to the point of death and hymns of praise, which befit his divine gifts as God’s royal vicegerent.

Chapter 4 consists of an introduction to the discourses and ideologies of patronage and benefaction and to the ways in which they are appropriated throughout the Apocalypse. Across ancient Mediterranean societies, one of the primary functions of the king consisted of distributing benefits to subjects, material and otherwise, in order to establish loyalty amongst subjects as well as power that accrued therefrom, a pattern which is best understood within broader systems of patronage and benefaction. A survey of the general contours of personal, imperial, and divine patronage and benefaction reveal how some of the most basic discursive strategies, attending socio-cultural-economic realities, and underlying ethical frameworks not only appear in Revelation but constitute the primary means of depicting the relationship between God, Lamb, and the followers thereof. In sum, Revelation depicts the Lamb as a royal benefactor who dispenses divine benefits on behalf of God.

A gift of a patron necessitated a response on the part of the recipient, which most often took the form of loyalty and other honors befitting the gift. Especially magnanimous benefactions were considered “divine” and compelled “divine” honors, including festivals, processions, priesthoods, crowns, and hymns. Chapter 5 presents a survey of the honors-for-benefits system inherent in systems of patronage and benefaction in the ancient Mediterranean world, with attention to the varieties of “divine” rewards requited for “divine” gifts, including especially divine hymns. This survey contextualizes the divine honors requitted to the Lamb, namely, allegiance to the point of death and hymns of praise, which befit his divine gifts as God’s royal vicegerent.

“Asklepios and the Limits of the Possible,” interrogates Asklepios’ presence in Pythian 3 through the lens of interwoven generic frameworks, arguing that these function as a critical lens for the depiction of Asklepios’ changing cultic status and its activation within Pindar’s theological project. I focus on the ode’s extended Asklepian myths, arguing that they that they alternate between depicting Asklepios as an embodiment of failed human overreach and failure and as a superhuman healer by oscillating between the structures of negative epinician exemplum and cult hymn. These interwoven Asklepian identities require the ode’s recipient, an ailing Hieron of Syracuse, to understand his own aspirations and limitations in light of Asklepios’ identities, divided into mortal and immortal strands by Pindar’s modeling. The ode encourages Hieron, as mortal worshipper, to seek Asklepios’ healing, while himself aspiring, as epinician victor, to immortality in song.

Chapter 8 is an account of music-making at Christian social meals over the course of the first four centuries of the Common Era. Topics include musical activities at community suppers, private Christian dinner parties, and martyr festivals, as well as ways in which certain Christian writers saw a parallel between singing by turns at Christian social meals and the customs of classical Greeks. The earliest form of Christian music was the self-composed song or hymn, whose setting was the community supper and private Christian dinner party. In time, biblical psalms were taken up as part of the individual Christian’s song repertoire for social meals and prayer gatherings. During the third and fourth centuries, personal hymnody was largely displaced by psalmody. Meanwhile, differing preferences and moral sensibilities among Christians, typically with overtones of class, troubled inner church relations over musical recreations in both church and nonchurch social settings.

This chapter deals with the development of early hymnography (c. 400–600 CE), including the Syriac and Georgian texts that influenced, or witnessed to, the Greek tradition. After an introductory section that deals with the second-century Odes of Solomon and fourth-century hymns of Ephrem the Syrian, the chapter moves on to fifth- and sixth-century Syriac poetry and dialogues, followed by important Greek hymns such as the Akathistos. The chapter concludes with sections on the Akathistos Hymn and on the sixth-century hymnographer Romanos the Melodist, who was responsible for creating a more human, as opposed to symbolic, literary image of the Virgin. Romanos remained influential for both hymnography and homiletics in subsequent centuries, as liturgical writers elaborated the image of the Virgin Mary as human mother and intercessor for their audiences.

I return to hymnography in this chapter, looking at the development of a full calendar of Marian praise between about 600 and 1000 CE. The main source of Marian hymnography is the major feasts, which include the Virgin’s Nativity, Entrance into the Temple, Annunciation, Dormition and others. The festal hymns, which include kontakia, stichera, kanons and various other forms, provide Christological teaching, although intercessory supplication to the Virgin may also play a role in short hymns known as theotokia. It is especially in the weekday services that we find intense supplication to the Theotokos, particularly on Wednesdays and Fridays. Her human lament at the foot of the cross, which was remembered on those days throughout the liturgical year, may symbolise the contrition that was expected of monks and nuns at all times; it also highlights Mary’s human qualities, which came to be understood as models for ascetics to imitate.

This essay emphasizes the centrality of evangelical women poets to the culture and development of early American poetics (including hymnody), which had lasting effects well into the nineteenth century. It makes three related claims. First, early evangelical poetry was a capacious lived literature that constituted one of the major aesthetic developments of the eighteenth century. Second, one of the momentous outgrowths of this eighteenth-century experiential Christian poetics was an early form of the Poetess, a trope scholars predominantly discuss as a nineteenth-century cultural form. And third, recognizing this longer development of the evangelical poetess resituates Phillis Wheatley Peters’ poetics within an antiwhite supremacist tradition produced by free and enslaved Black people. The essay argues for the necessity of broader and deeper engagement with various eighteenth-century religious poetics in order to braid them back together with the social forms and histories within which they arose and remained entangled.

I return to hymnography in this chapter, looking at the development of a full calendar of Marian praise between about 600 and 1000 CE. The main source of Marian hymnography is the major feasts, which include the Virgin’s Nativity, Entrance into the Temple, Annunciation, Dormition and others. The festal hymns, which include kontakia, stichera, kanons and various other forms, provide Christological teaching, although intercessory supplication to the Virgin may also play a role in short hymns known as theotokia. It is especially in the weekday services that we find intense supplication to the Theotokos, particularly on Wednesdays and Fridays. Her human lament at the foot of the cross, which was remembered on those days throughout the liturgical year, may symbolise the contrition that was expected of monks and nuns at all times; it also highlights Mary’s human qualities, which came to be understood as models for ascetics to imitate.

This chapter deals with the development of early hymnography (c. 400–600 CE), including the Syriac and Georgian texts that influenced, or witnessed to, the Greek tradition. After an introductory section that deals with the second-century Odes of Solomon and fourth-century hymns of Ephrem the Syrian, the chapter moves on to fifth- and sixth-century Syriac poetry and dialogues, followed by important Greek hymns such as the Akathistos. The chapter concludes with sections on the Akathistos Hymn and on the sixth-century hymnographer Romanos the Melodist, who was responsible for creating a more human, as opposed to symbolic, literary image of the Virgin. Romanos remained influential for both hymnography and homiletics in subsequent centuries, as liturgical writers elaborated the image of the Virgin Mary as human mother and intercessor for their audiences.

Music, for too long, has been omitted in evaluations of Elizabeth Bishop – who studied piano and counterpoint for years and contemplated becoming a composer; who crossed continents with a clavichord, collecting instruments, scores, and records; and who cherished music as a profound analogue for poetry and its closest cousin among the arts. While generations of critics have given us frames for understanding Bishop as a visualist, this chapter shifts focus from her seeing to her hearing and enumerates five distinguishing characteristics of music as it appears in her work: manipulation of time, markings of place, involvement of both nature and culture, emotionally driven fantasy, and thisworldly sources. Following Bishop’s listening chronologically, as she encounters the European classical tradition, African American and Caribbean popular musics, and Brazilian folk music and samba, this chapter argues that Bishop fruitfully counterpointed music with her shifting sense of lyric poetry: sometimes music and lyrics bordered lyric; sometimes song was lyric’s unachievable opposite.

From the invocation to Aphrodite in fr. 1, the gods are a constant force in the world evoked in Sappho’s poetry. Chapter 15 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho examines cultic and religious presences from a literary point of view.

This chapter by Marian Wilson Kimber explores the relation between music, dance and poetry in late nineteenth-century amateur dance performances in the United States, specifically Delsarte. With reference to little-known archival sources (musical scores, photographs, programme leaflets and educational guides), Wilson Kimber examines how elocutionists combined their recitation with posing in imitation of ancient Greek statuary. These performances grew from the expressive physical fitness movement named after the nineteenth-century French musician and teacher Delsarte. The practice is itself rooted in elocution, recitation or public speaking that was a common form of entertainment on programmes with chamber music throughout the United States. To the accompaniment of hymns, women recited and posed to entertain one another, but also with the goal of self-improvement. Describing these practices, Wilson Kimber articulates a historical case of what we might call choreographic legitimization, considering ways in which dancers sought to elevate the seemingly suspect status of their art with reference to ancient Classical values and sacred music.