“Stanzas” (which means “rooms” in Italian) is a blend of philology, the psychoanalysis of toys, medieval physics and psychology, and contemporary linguistics and philosophy. In ...
Continue Reading →The linguist and philologist Jacob Grimm (1785–1863) is best remembered as co-editor, with his brother Wilhelm, of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, though their great Deutsches ...
Continue Reading →When Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm set out to collect stories in the early 1800s, their goal was not to entertain children but to preserve ...
Continue Reading →The first complete modern translation of Bruno’s “De Imaginum Signorum et Idearum Composition,” first published in 1591, a complex multilevel work that incorporates astrology, hermetic, ...
Continue Reading →Published in 1494 in Basel, The Ship of Fools was soon translated into every major European language. It provoked a vast number of imitations and ...
Continue Reading →“In the ten volumes of “The Nights” proper, I mostly avoided parallels of folk-lore and fabliaux which, however interesting and valuable to scholars, would have ...
Continue Reading →The greatest of the heroic epics to emerge from medieval Germany, the Nibelungenlied is a revenge saga of sweeping dimensions. It tells of the dragon-slayer ...
Continue Reading →Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is probably the most skillfuly told story in the whole of the English Arthurian cycle. Originating from the north-west ...
Continue Reading →“I sing of arms and the man . . . ” So begins the Aeneid, greatest of Western epic poems. Virgil’s story of the journey ...
Continue Reading →After completing his labours, Herakles finally returns home, sending ahead a young woman, Iole, to serve his bed. In an attempt to regain Herakles’ affection ...
Continue Reading →