In The Discarded Image, C. S. Lewis paints a lucid picture of the medieval world view, providing the historical and cultural background to the literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. It describes the "image" discarded by later years as "the medieval synthesis itself, the whole organization of their theology, science and history into a single, complex, harmonious mental model of the universe." This, Lewis's last book, has been hailed as "the...

Ernst Robert Curtius held the chair of romance literature and language at Bonn University from 1929 until his retirement in 1951. Colin Burrow is a fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford. He is the author of Epic Romance: Homer to Milton. Published just after the Second World War, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages is a sweeping exploration of the remarkable continuity of European literature across time and place, from the...

"In this now-classic history of Roman civilization, Edith Hamilton vividly depicts Roman life and spirit as they are revealed by the greatest writers of the age. Among these literary guides are Cicero, who left an incomparable collection of letters; Catullus, who was the quintessential poet of love; Horace, who chronicled a cruel and materialistic Rome; and the Romantics: Virgil, Livy, and Seneca. Hamilton concludes her work by contrasting the high-mindedness...

"The Satyricon is the most celebrated work of fiction to have survived from the ancient world. The first realistic novel and the father of the picaresque genre, it recounts the sleazy progress of a pair of literate scholars as they wander through the cities of the southern Mediterranean. En route they encounter characters the author wickedly satirizes - a teacher in higher education, a libidinous priestess, a vulgar freedman turned millionaire, a...