How well do you really know old Arty? It all began with the Welsh: The The Annales Cabriae (inside) and parts of the Welsh oral tradition (later collected into
the Mabinogion) give a very different picture of the popular King Arthur than contemporary readers are familiar with: no Lancelot, three or four different Guens, no love triangles or Holy Grails. A look at the vast scope of the Arthurian legend.
[more inside]
posted by kittenmarlowe
on Dec 19, 2011 -
30 comments
Hanover Historical Texts Project is a collection of primary source texts from ancient times to the modern era in English translation. There is a great number of interesting texts, for instance accounts of
Zeno, he of the paradoxes,
the diary of Lady Sarashina, a lady-in-waiting in Heian era Japan,
a letter from Count Stephen of Blois and Chartres, a crusader writing to his wife,
Arthur Young's travels in France before and during the Revolution,
a report by the American ambassador in St. Petersburg on March 20th, 1917, immediately after the February Revolution, and finally
Petrarch's letter about his graphomania. That last one is from what is perhaps my favorite part of the website, a trove of
Petrarch's Familiar Letters. But there's much more in the Hanover Historical Texts Projects besides what I've mentioned.
posted by Kattullus
on Oct 24, 2011 -
6 comments
Humanities and the Liberal Arts is the personal website of former Middlebury classics professor
William Harris who passed away in 2009.
In his retirement he crafted a wonderful site full of essays,
music,
sculpture,
poetry and his thoughts on anything from
education to
technology. But the heart of the website for me is, unsurprisingly,
his essays on ancient Latin and Greek literature some of whom are book-length works. Here are a few examples:
Purple color in Homer,
complete fragments of Heraclitus,
how to read Homer and Vergil,
a discussion of a recently unearthed poem by Sappho,
Plato and mathematics,
Propertius' war poems, and finally, especially close to my heart, his commentaries on the poetry of Catullus, for example on
Ipsithilla,
Odi et amo,
Attis poem as dramatic dance performance and
a couple of very dirty poems (even by Catullus' standard). That's just a taste of the riches found on Harris' site, which has been around nearly as long as the world wide web has existed.
posted by Kattullus
on Sep 30, 2011 -
18 comments
4,500 additional pages omitted from Flaubert's 500-page
Madame Bovary have been released online (in French). "The site –
www.bovary.fr – contains not only the published text and images of the barely legible manuscripts but interactive controls which allow the reader to re-instate passages corrected or cut by Flaubert or his publishers." It took "between three and 10 hours to decipher a single page of Flaubert's writing," done mostly by volunteers from around the world.
posted by stbalbach
on Apr 19, 2009 -
39 comments
On
British TV last night,
Gail Trimble, a Classics scholar at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, singlehandedly
trounced the opposing team in
University Challenge. To some a
smug,
bluestocking know-it-all, to others a
role model. Cue the fightback and lots of
questions about whether we, as a society, actually like really clever people and specifically, clever
women?.
posted by MuffinMan
on Feb 24, 2009 -
166 comments
The Tale of the Heike (Heike Monogatari) is a medieval Japanese account of the rise and fall of the Taira clan and has inspired many other works of art. Click on the chapters and scroll down to see
Heike illustrations (or start
here), see
more art or
figures inspired by the Heike. Would you rather read?
[more inside]
posted by ersatz
on Nov 16, 2008 -
10 comments
In Parentheses is a collection of many ancient, medieval and classic texts from all over the world, many of whom are hard to find anywhere, let alone on the internet. There are translations from
Greek,
Old Norse,
Medieval Irish,
Japanese,
Incan,
Old French,
Medieval Latin and many more! As well as all that they have
papers in medieval studies and
vaguely decadent and
orientalism series. Adding to that there's a
linguistics section with wordlists and language flash cards in languages such as
Icelandic,
Quechua,
Basque,
Classical Armenian and a whole bunch more.
[flashcard links go to pdf files]
posted by Kattullus
on Jul 10, 2008 -
18 comments
De Architectura, known also as The Ten Books of Architecture, is an exposition on architecture by Marcus Vitruvius Pollio. Originally in Latin, here it is translated into English.
posted by nthdegx
on Nov 9, 2006 -
15 comments
In 1875,
Josiah Mason gave a gift to establish a college which was called the Mason Science College (now a part of the
University of Birmingham). Within the terms of the gift to the institutuion, one of the stipulations was that
classics not be taught. Of course at such an institution, the
Founder Day's address was logically given by
Thomas Henry Huxley on the place of Science in Education. Huxley preached the virtues of science and derisively dismissed all value in studying classics, and he wondered whether any rational person would choose to study classics over science. His conclusion was that the only people who would choose a study of classics are those like "that Levite of culture"
Matthew Arnold. Arnold took the
opportunity to respond to his friend. In his reply, Arnold acknowledged that nobody would expect him to engage Huxley in a debate about science, and though he wouldn't presume to take on Huxley in such a debate, he did want to mention something that struck him as he thumbed through
a book of Huxley's
friend. Arnold noted that he was struck by the idea that "our ancestor was a hairy quadruped furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in his habits." Arnold acknowledged that he isn't a scientist and therefore doesn't dispute such a claim, but he did want to point out that even if that were true, with regards to this good fellow, there must have been a necessity in him that inclined him to Greek. And would always incline him to Greek. After all, we got there, didn't we?
posted by dios
on May 26, 2006 -
27 comments
Can't hack Catullus in
Latin? How about
Brazilian Portuguese,
Catalan,
Chinese,
Danish,
Dutch,
English,
Estonian,
French,
German,
Hungarian,
Irish,
Italian,
Japanese,
Norwegian,
Polish,
Portuguese,
Rioplatense,
Romanian,
Russian,
Scanned,
Serbian,
South African,
Spanish,
Swedish, or
Welsh? You can also compare two languages side by side.
posted by kenko
on Apr 11, 2005 -
15 comments
Classic Cat describes itself as "the free classical music directory," and offers links to 3rd-party-hosted downloadable recordings, sliced and diced by
hits,
composer,
performer, and
more. There are active
fora. Given the old-school look of the site, I was surprised not to find it in my repost search.
posted by mwhybark
on Feb 13, 2005 -
13 comments
The Ladder is a website devoted to the writer
Henry James (1843-1916). It comprises
electronic editions of a selection of James’s works and also
* a textual note
on the source and any amendments required during editing
* annotations of the text explaining such things as references to real persons and places, references to other fiction by James, or in
in his notebboks
* a summary and a detailed (chapter by chapter) synopsis of the plot, so you can easily find passages you remember, by what happens
* a bibliography including original publications, subsequent reprints
Interestingly enough, lately more than a few writers seem to have
a bit of James-mania: in June,
Colm Tóibín published "
The Master", a portrait of James recovering from his humiliating failure as a playwright. Now comes "
Author, Author", by
David Lodge, which is about James' humiliating failure as a playwright as well. These in turn arrive on the heels of
Emma Tennant's "
Felony", a novel about James' near-romance with
Constance Fenimore
Woolson, and
Alan Hollinghurst's "
The Line of Beauty", a
BookerPrize-winning novel in which James plays an important off-the-stage role.
posted by matteo
on Nov 1, 2004 -
12 comments
Are you not amazed at how she evokes soul, body, hearing, tongue, sight, skin, as though they were external and belonged to someone else? And how at one and the same moment she both freezes and burns, is irrational and sane, is terrified and nearly dead, so that we observe in her not a single emotion but a whole concourse of emotions? Such things do, of course, commonly happen to people in love. Sappho’s supreme excellence lies in the skill with which she selects the most striking and vehement circumstances of the passions and forges them into a coherent whole. Longinus, On the Sublime Sappho’s poem of jealousy survives only because the ancient critic Longinus quoted it as a supreme example of poetic intensity--now Ken Knabb has put up 26 translations of it in the English at the
Gateway to the Vast Realms , the literature and texts section of his
Bureau of Public Secrets. And wait! There's more!
posted by y2karl
on Oct 2, 2004 -
10 comments
Custom paperback editions of classic novels starring YOU! Now also available in a "happy ending" edition! Didn't like that
Romeo and Juliet die at the end? Choose the Happy Ending Version a new scene is added with a twist — the lovers live happily ever after! A short scene is added after Act V Scene III. It turns out the apothecary's poison didn't work and Romeo survives, and Juliet's stabbing of herself merely made her pass out. The problem with public domain is that the integrity of the original is lost once it's Disneyfied.
posted by riffola
on Apr 30, 2003 -
20 comments
"Once Upon A Classic." A Boston Globe article by Ty Burr (reprinted on the PT Anderson website) that lists the new "classic" film canon for the post-MTV generation. Here's the top five: 1. Pulp Fiction, 2. The Godfather, 3. Fight Club, 4. Run Lola Run 5. Amelie. Discuss!
posted by adrober
on Apr 15, 2003 -
109 comments
"The study of feelings, once the province of psychology, is now spreading to history, literature, and other fields." Scholarship on
the emotions is a rich field for historians and philosophers.
Martha Nussbaum (previously discussed
here) has written on historical views of the relationship between
morality and emotion, and delves more deeply into it in her recent book,
Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Of particular relevance these days may be M.F. Burnyeat's new book,
Restraining Rage: The Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity, which focuses on Classical views of anger and its proper place in human action. Many today could learn from
Marcus Aurelius: "as grief is a mark of weakness, so is anger, for both have been wounded and have surrendered to the wound." [First link via
Ye Olde Phart.]
posted by homunculus
on Feb 25, 2003 -
17 comments
The Journey to the West is one of China's most popular literary classics. This site illustrates one section of this important story, the birth of the Monkey King, with 100 beautiful images. You can also take the time to read selections from several other Chinese classics, notably
The Romance of the Three Kingdoms,
The Tale of the Water Margin and one of my all time favorites,
The Romance of the Western Chamber. These works, and others on the site, are important in their own right, but are also significant because they are source material for Chinese film, TV and especially for
Jingju, which Westerners call
Beijing opera.
posted by Joey Michaels
on Oct 9, 2002 -
16 comments
Mortimer Adler Dies at the age of 98. He founded the Great Books programs that many colleges adopted and believed that ones education never stops.
posted by vanderwal
on Jul 1, 2001 -
8 comments
