Has nostalgia existed forever or only since a given date? The word is first attested in 1688, but the experience of homesickness for a specific place, time, or both may be universal among human beings. Today nostalgia receives extensive scrutiny, in mass media as well as in scholarship. Longing for the Middle Ages has been regarded as sometimes dangerous for political reasons. Suspicion has grown about nostalgia for and in the medieval period: consider the furor over the term Anglo-Saxon. The Medieval Latin Poem of Walthare, better known as the Waltharius, cries out for a share of attention. This essay situates the Poem of Walthare within nostalgia studies. The examination reviews the many different types of nostalgia that have been identified lately. Alongside private and collective, it touches on the role of consumerism and the politicization of nostalgia, especially by (neo-)Nazis, white supremacists, and their opponents. At the same time, the study delves into the earlier medical view of nostalgia: this syndrome was diagnosed among Swiss mercenaries in the late seventeenth century. The recent debates have interesting consequences for the short medieval epic, which is rooted in the events of a distant Germanic past, which produced legends of exiles who yearned for their homes and peoples. Yet the Latin of the Middle Ages does not fit naturally within modern national languages and literatures. Since the late eighteenth century, the poem has been coordinated with early medieval German culture. Jacob Grimm, who played a foundational role in this research, paid heed to the longing for a German homeland that he felt. Joseph Victor von Scheffel had his own nostalgia for long-ago Saint Gall.

This is the first book to approach the visuality of ancient Greek drama through the lens of theater phenomenology. Gathering evidence from tragedy, comedy, satyr play, and vase painting, Naomi Weiss argues that, from its very beginnings, Greek theater in the fifth century BCE was understood as a complex interplay of actuality and virtuality. Classical drama frequently exposes and interrogates potential viewing experiences within the theatron—literally, “the place for seeing.” Weiss shows how, in so doing, it demands distinctive modes of engagement from its audiences. Examining plays and pottery with attention to the instability and ambiguity inherent in visual perception, Seeing Theater provides an entirely new model for understanding this ancient art form.

Letters were an important medium of everyday communication in the ancient Mediterranean. Soon after its emergence, the epistolary form was adopted by educated elites and transformed into a literary genre, which developed distinctive markers and was used, for instance, to give political advice, to convey philosophical ideas, or to establish and foster ties with peers. A particular type of this genre is the letter cast in verse, or epistolary poem, which merges the form and function of the letter with stylistic elements of poetry. In Greek literature, epistolary poetry is first safely attested in the fourth century AD and would enjoy a lasting presence throughout the Byzantine and early modern periods.
The present volume introduces the reader to this hitherto unexplored chapter of post-classical Greek literature through an anthology of exemplary epistolary poems in the original Greek with facing English translation. This collection, which covers a broad chronological range from late antique epigrams of the Greek Anthology to the poetry of western humanists, is accompanied by exegetical commentaries on the anthologized texts and by critical essays discussing questions of genre, literary composition, and historical and social contexts of selected epistolary poems.

A Companion to Byzantine Epistolography introduces and contextualizes the culture of Byzantine letter-writing from various socio-historical, material and literary angles. While this culture was long regarded as an ivory-tower pastime of intellectual elites, the eighteen essays in this volume, authored by leading experts in the field, show that epistolography had a vital presence in many areas of Byzantine society, literature and art. The chapters offer discussions of different types of letters and intersections with non-epistolary genres, their social functions as media of communication and performance, their representations in visual and narrative genres, and their uses in modern scholarship. The volume thus contributes to a more nuanced understanding of letter-writing in the Byzantine Empire and beyond.