The production of Jesus literature was a Christian growth industry in late antiquity.

--Aune, David E. The New Testament in Its Literary Environment, p. 68.

Bloody comps. At least they'll be over tomorrow.

Courtesy of my thesis research, I bring you a passage from the 1601 Foreword to Peri and Rinuccini's Euridice, one of the several operas on the Orpheus theme which preceded Monteverdi's (vastly superior) 1607 attempt. Peri is referring to one of his singers.

One who heard and praised her was Messer Giovan Battista Jacomelli, most excellent in ( Read more... )

Actual sentence from the presentation that I am going to give in class tomorrow:

It is here that Webster’s use of language and more specifically of metaphor becomes important. The Duchess of Malfi is stuffed almost to bursting with bird metaphors (although despite this stuffing, no turkey is mentioned) which are used by the characters, in ( Read more... )

"Robert D. Kaplan, another contemporary commentator lionized by American militarists, has even urged in Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos that American foreign policy not allow itself to be constrained by Judeo-Christian morality and that 'progress often comes from hurting others.' If we are to maintain our global preeminence, ( Read more... )

Sir Philip Sidney, on the merits of the English language:

Another will say it wanteth grammar. Nay truly, it hath that praise, that it wants not grammar: for grammar it might have, but it needs it not, being so easy in itself, and so void of those cumbersome differences of cases, genders, moods, and tenses, which I think was a piece of the Tower ( Read more... )

Knowing Professor Hammond's luck, one may expect to read at any moment of the discovery in a Bronze Age Theban midden of an inscription in Phoenician characters reading 'Kadmos was here.'

- Richard Buxton, Imaginary GreeceOh, academe ( Read more... )

Even with these omissions, however, Deuteronomy is long. And the style underlines this characteristic. It is the opposite of terse. The writer never uses one word where he can think of two, and he always can....The writer achieves a vehemence, a volume one might say, which is well suited for reproducing the thunders of Yahweh's great indignation. ( Read more... )

AESCHYLUS:... You can tag any old thing onto your iambs, like "and a tuffet of wool," "and a cruet of oil," "and a diminutive sack..." Look, I'll show you ( Read more... )

Gilgamesh does not actually die because of either of his failures, but in falling asleep when he should not he proves himself weaker than sleep, which is often seen as a cousin or sibling to death (though not in the same way as the “little death” of later European thought).I WILL STOP PUTTING UNVEILED INNUENDO INTO MY SCHOLARLY WORK. YES I WILL ( Read more... )

Henderson’s first characteristic is the hero’s “miraculous but humble birth” (110). The epic does not tell us about Gilgamesh’s birth. It may be miraculous, since he is two-thirds divine and only one-third mortal; indeed, from a biological standpoint it would have to be.This is what happens when I have to write fifteen pages for a class that I find ( Read more... )