Begräbnisdichtung im russischen Barock: Simeon Polockijs Threnodien

Summary This article is about Simeon Polotskii’s voluminous lament of 1669 about the death of Mariia Il’inichna, the wife of tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich. The lament is analysed as a specimen of baroque court poetry and as a poetic cycle. Special attention is paid to its religious content. What are the lament’s principal ideas about death and the afterlife? How does it treat the central motif of contemptus mundi, the Christian contempt of life on earth? And how does it relate to the religious tenets of the Orthodox Church?

The Syntax of Absolute Verbal Forms in Early Welsh Poetry: A Survey

This paper undertakes a comprehensive survey of the syntax of absolute forms of verbs in the corpus of early Welsh poetry known ashengerdd. Comparisons are made with the syntax of absolute forms in Old Irish, in Old Welsh and Old Breton, in Middle Welsh court poetry of the twelfth century onwards, and with those found in Middle Welsh prose texts.

DISTINCTION, CENTRALITY AND CULTURAL APPROPRIATION IN PRE-ALEXANDRIAN COURT POETRY: THE CASE OF LYCIA

This article examines allusions to Greek poetry in two Greek verse inscriptions carved on public monuments for Lycian dynasts of the late fifth and early fourth centuries b.c. (CEG 177, 888). Scholarship on these epigrams celebrating the rule, achievements and outstanding qualities of the dynasts Gergis (Lycian Kheriga) and Arbinas (Erbinna) has largely focussed on the evidence they provide for Lycian history, dynastic ideology and Lycia's relationship to Greece. Less attention has been paid to the possible significance of their long-noted echoes of Greek poetry. Literary analysis of these epigrams has been sidelined, it seems, owing to a prevailing assumption that they were composed and inscribed primarily for Greeks visiting or resident in Xanthus, the Lycian ‘capital’ where they were inscribed, and so their literariness, unheard by Lycian ears, cannot add to our understanding of Lycia and Lycians. Yet, a recent observation of Peter Thonemann suggests that the appropriation and manipulation of Greek poetry is in fact central to the dynastic intent of the epigrams: to assert Lycia's non-Greek, ‘Asiatic’ identity.

Gender, Authority, and Control: Male Invective and the Restriction of Female Ambition in Early Modern Scotland and England, 1583–1616

Sixteenth-century discourse is filled with criticisms about the ambition of women and the proletariat. This article explores the connection between gender, ambition, authority, reputation, and the language of condemnation at the Jacobean court. It argues that the prevailing rhetoric vilifying female ambition reflects contemporaneous anxieties about female dominance and authority. In turn, male invective, libel, and slander, directed toward politically active elite women, represent men’s attempts to re-exert their authority over women perceived to be subverting established hierarchies of power. By tracing the use of invective in letters, court poetry, and moral essays, this paper reveals the ways in which abusive language was used to damage women’s reputations in order to establish and maintain male authority over women and other men in the court of James VI/I.