The Italian and English texts of each canto are preceded by notes on their historical, mythological, and ethical implications

Describes the history of France after the collapse of Roman control of Western Europe in the sixth century.

A translation of the classic poem about man's spiritual journey

Finest heroic poem in Old English celebrates character and exploits of Beowulf, a young nobleman of the Geats, a people of southern Sweden. Narrative combines mythical elements, Christian and pagan sensibilities, actual historical figures and events to create a striking work of great power and beauty. Genealogies.

Charles S. Singleton's edition of the Divine Comedy, of which this is the first part, provides the English-speaking reader with everything he needs to read and understand Dante's great masterpiece. The Italian text here is in the edition of Giorgio Petrocchi, the leading Italian editor of Dante. Professor Singleton's prose translation, facing the Italian in a line-for-line arrangement on each page, is smooth and literate. The companion volume, the Commentary, marshals every point of information the reader may require: vocabulary; grammar; identification of Dante's characters; historical sources of some of the incidents and, where pertinent, excerpts from those sources in their original languages and in translation; profound clear analysis of the Divine Comedy's basic allegory. There is a complete bibliography of every aspect of Dante studies. This first part of the Divine Comedy which is illustrated with maps of Italy and the region Dante knew especially, diagrams of the circles of Hell, and plates showing some of the historic sites mentioned by Dante in his poem.

Designed as both a contribution to original research and as a stimulating and accessible text, this volume is a helpful, reliable, responsive and adaptable resource for students of Chaucer at all levels.

A translation of the medieval epic poem about Roland's adventures and death in Charlemagne's war against the pagans.

A retelling of the medieval poem about a group of travelers on a pilgrimage to Canterbury and the tales they tell each other.

One of the most famous books in the world, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, read by every Renaissance intellectual and referred to in studies of art and culture ever since, was first published in English by Thames & Hudson in 1999 in a large format that exactly matched the original in size, design, and typography. Now this classic study is made available to a wider public in a reduced-format volume that retains all the text and illustrations. It is a strange, pagan, pedantic, erotic, allegorical, mythological romance relating in highly stylized Italian the quest of Poliphilo for his beloved Polia. The author (presumed to be Francesco Colonna, a friar of dubious reputation) was obsessed by architecture, landscape, and costumeit is not going too far to say sexually obsessedand its 174 woodcuts are a primary source for Renaissance ideas on both buildings and gardens. In 1592 a beginning was made to produce an English version but the translator gave up partway. The task has been triumphantly accomplished by Joscelyn Godwin, who succeeds in reproducing all its wayward charm and arcane learning in language accessible to the modern reader. 174 b/w illustrations.

This startling new translation of Dante's Inferno is by Ciaran Carson, one of contemporary Ireland's most dazzlingly gifted poets. Written in a vigorous and inventive contemporary idiom, while also reproducing the intricate rhyme-scheme that is so essential to the beauty and power of Dante's epic, Carson's virtuosic rendering of the Inferno is that rare thing—a translation with the heft and force of a true English poem. Like Seamus Heaney's Beowulf and Ted Hughes's Tales from Ovid, Ciaran Carson's Inferno is an extraordinary modern response to one of the great works of world literature.