Curated playlist
History of literature
- Friedrich SchillerFriedrich Schiller was born on the 10th of November 1759 in Marbach, in the Duchy of Württemberg, named after King Frederick the Great but called Fritz by nearly everyone who knew him. He died at forty-five from tuberculosis, and in the…
- Matter of RomeThe Matter of Rome is the name medieval poets gave to an entire world of stories: the myths, wars, and heroes of classical Greece and Rome, refracted through medieval eyes. The term comes from the French poet Jean Bodel, who sorted the…
- Elizabethan literatureElizabethan literature names the body of writing produced during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, from 1558 to 1603. In those forty-five years, English writers reinvented what their language could do. They borrowed the sonnet from Italy,…
- Matter of BritainThe Matter of Britain is the name given to one of the three great story cycles that shaped medieval European literature. Jean Bodel, a French poet of the 12th century, was the first to name all three, placing the Matter of Britain…
- Latin literatureLatin literature began on a single day in 240 BC, when the first stage play in Latin was performed in Rome. The man who wrote it, Livius Andronicus, was not Roman by birth. He was a Greek prisoner of war, brought to the city as a slave in…
- EpigramThe epigram began not in books but on stone. Ancient Greek writers carved short poems onto votive offerings at sanctuaries and onto the graves of the dead, words meant to last as long as the rock itself. One such inscription still echoes…
- Neo-Latin studiesNeo-Latin studies names the field devoted to Latin writing from the Italian Renaissance to the present day. These texts are, scholars argue, among the primary archives for understanding how learning and culture developed in early modern…
- Renaissance LatinRenaissance Latin is the literary style that humanist scholars forged from roughly the fourteenth to the fifteenth century, insisting that the centuries of accumulated medieval usage had corrupted the tongue of the Romans. Their rallying…
- History of literatureThe history of literature is the story of how prose and poetry came to entertain and educate readers, and how the techniques behind those works developed over time. Not everything written counts. A compilation of data, like a check…
- Greek literatureGreek literature stretches across roughly two thousand eight hundred years, from poems fixed around 800 BC to novels published today. That span is staggering on its own. But the more remarkable fact is what it contains: the first works of…
- Neo-LatinNeo-Latin is the name scholars give to the Latin written and spoken across Europe from the Italian Renaissance onward, a style that deliberately turned its back on medieval habits and reached for the ancient Romans as its model. In the…