Category: Publication

Eros and Mythos, An Anthology

Just out: Bardo Maria Gauly and Alexander Arweiler (eds), Henriette Harich-Schwarzbauer (contrib.), Eros und Mythos. Liebes- und Hochzeitsdichtung des vierten bis sechsten Jahrhunderts. Lateinisch und deutsch, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2025.

Contains Latin text and German translation of Sidonius’ epithalamia, among other love and wedding poetry.

In catalogue

Furbetta and Stoehr-Monjou in Stumbling Texts

Luciana Furbetta and Annick Stoehr-Monjou contributed chapters to a new volume, edited by Christian Guerra, Markus Kersten and Ann-Kathrin Stähle, The Dynamics of Paratextuality in Late Antique Literature: Stumbling Texts, sera tela, London: Bloomsbury, 2024. Available here

These chapters are:

  • Furbetta, ‘Legere or tegere? Reflections on a “Key Question” for the Late Antique Author and His Readers’ (discussing Sidon. Ep. 8.4, 8.16, 9.13, Carm. 8, 24, among other things), pp. 39-52.
  • Stoehr-Monjou, ‘Poetics of Conclusion in Sidonius’ Letters (Books 7-9, Epist. 9.12-16)’, pp. 53-70.

The Cambridge Critical Guide to Latin Literature

New out Roy Gibson and Christopher Whitton (eds), The Cambridge Critical Guide to Latin Literature, CUP 2024.

Sidonius specifically figures in Gavin Kelly’s chapter on Periodisations (pp. 97-157)

“The Cambridge Critical Guide to Latin Literature offers a critical overview of work on Latin literature. Where are we? How did we get here? Where to next? Fifteen commissioned chapters, along with an extensive introduction and Mary Beard’s postscript, approach these questions from a range of angles. They aim not to codify the field, but to give snapshots of the discipline from different perspectives, and to offer provocations for future development. The Critical Guide aims to stimulate reflection on how we engage with Latin literature. Texts, tools and territories are the three areas of focus. The Guide situates the study of classical Latin literature within its global context from late antiquity to Neo-Latin, moving away from an exclusive focus on the pre-200 CE corpus. It recalibrates links with adjoining disciplines (history, philosophy, material culture, linguistics, political thought, Greek), and takes a fresh look at key tools (editing, reception, intertextuality, theory).”

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Ungvary on the Poetics of Asceticism

David Ungvary wrote Converting Verse: The Poetics of Asceticism in Late Roman Gaul, Oxford Studies in Late Antiquity, Oxford: OUP, 2024.

See item in catalogue here

Has a chapter on Sidonius: ‘Announcing Renunciation: Sidonius Apollinaris and Poetic Disavowal’. The blurb reads:

  • Offers one of the first English translations of Ennodius’s Eucharisticon, among the earliest successors to Augustine’s Confessions
  • Provides a new cultural history of Christian Latin poetry, with a focus on Gaul
  • Illuminates the strong social affiliations and literary interplay among understudied and non-canonical Latin authors of Late Antiquity
  • Employs a diverse interpretive methodology, drawing from Classics, religious studies, historiography, and literary theory, to update literary historical analysis of postclassical poetry

Why Empires Fall

Peter Heather and John Rapley, Why Empires Fall: Rome, America, and the Future of the West, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023. Listed here.

Over the last three centuries, the West rose to dominate the planet. Then, around the start of the new millennium, history took a dramatic turn. Faced with economic stagnation and internal political division, the West has found itself in rapid decline compared to the global periphery it had previously colonized. This is not the first time we have seen such a rise and fall: the Roman Empire followed a similar arc, from dizzying power to disintegration.

Historian Peter Heather and political economist John Rapley explore the uncanny parallels, and productive differences, between ancient Rome and the modern West, moving beyond the tropes of invading barbarians and civilizational decay to unearth new lessons. From 399 to 1999, they argue, through the unfolding of parallel, underlying imperial life cycles, both empires sowed the seeds of their own destruction. Has the era of Western global domination indeed reached its end? Heather and Rapley contemplate what comes next.