As a complement to the work of Alastair Minnis and Brian Scott on a collection of accessus or introductions to pedagogical texts copied on their own in a collection of such ’Literary Prefaces’, this essay examines the accessüs to a typical series of school texts copied together in a single thirteenth-century manuscript, Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Clm 391. The works included in this manuscript were all widely taught during the Middle Ages and are all known to scholars and available in English translations. Yet they are not automatically included in discussions of literary works studied in the Middle Ages and this essay is meant to support the implications of Minnis and Scott’s term for them.The introductory matter, sometimes more than two accessūs, is significantly more extensive at the beginning of the manuscript and as much as possible has been edited and translated in this essay. Ways that we might look positively upon repetition, variation and contradiction are suggested and the implications of the evolving formats of the introductory material throughout the manuscript are explored. It is hoped that this approach may encourage other scholars to look at the accessūs to school texts in other relevant collections.

The chapters in this book are all readings, or interpretations, of key characters and episodes in the Divine Comedy where it can be shown that what is at stake is a kind of faith. What has been argued is that reading itself is an act of faith, a willingness to trust not only in the individual human author or narrator, but in the larger story in which all truthful, good faith narratives somehow fit. A different faith, like a superseded hypothesis in science, is another way of approaching a single truth and it can be read, charitably, as such.

Soon after the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE, Pompeii seemed to have vanished. The buried city maintained a presence in the region’s collective memory primarily as an overwhelming absence, repressed even in the near-contemporary poetry that ruminated on its demise. In such texts, the name of Pompeii is conspicuous by its absence, and the shock over the swallowing up of this solid ancestral ground is keenly felt. This chapter argues that Martial, Statius, and others initiate the trope of Pompeii as an absent presence that continues to characterize our responses to the site today, even in the face of the apparently abundant materiality of the site. By following Pompeii’s disappearing act from these Latin authors through a variety of more recent engagements with the city – from the subterranean journey to the site in Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia (1504), to the sci-fi dislocation of the city in Amelie Nothomb’s novella, Péplum (1996), and the recent video installation Soleil Noir (2014), in which Pompeii becomes a post-human landscape – we can observe Pompeii’s importance as a locus for understanding the absences that permeate Roman culture, and our modern receptions of it.

From Homer on, the first similes in epic are strongly paradigmatic and symbolic; they emblematise an order on the human or cosmic scale, showing a contest between order and chaos. This pattern is analysed from Homer, Lucretius, Virgil and Lucan up to Milton’s Paradise Lost, whose first similes show a deep understanding of this ancient template.

Statius’ unfinished epic, the Achilleid, describes in its surviving opening portion the attempt of Achilles’ mother, Thetis, to stop him joining the expedition against Troy by disguising him as a girl on the island of Scyros. The chapter analyses Roman conceptions of gender and sexuality, as Achilles’ disguise does not prevent him from having sex with Deidamia. His underlying violent masculinity is revealed by the trickery of Ulysses.

Catullus features heavily in Chapter 21 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho, but he is by no means the only Roman literary figure to have found in Sappho an important predecessor. Ovid, Horace, and others give powerful evidence of her influence in Latin literature.

The Conclusion brings us back full circle to the Introduction. A first section opens with a brief epilogue on Latin receptions and the reinventions of the Hyperborean nexus as a figure of liminality beyond the reach of Rome's power, shaped by the tense and shifting dialogue of geographical knowledge and Roman imperium. The brief epilogue continues with further thoughts on the Western medieval fortunes of Hyperborea, as it makes its way through negotiations with the baggage and authority of classical geography, and the difficult integration of a northern earthly paradise in the eschatological space of Christian cosmovision. This is the moment when Hyperborea, the focus of our etic study of cosmography, becomes a figure of emic cosmographia. The discussion in these two sections rapidly moves from Catullus to Claudian, and from Aethicus Ister to the Hereford Map and Roger Bacon, an occasion to end with a glance at the emergence of Hyperborea as an object of scientific and theological knowledge in the early European university. A final section ends with a quick retrospective and further considerations on cosmography and the philology of distant worlds.

The dominant feature of the Greco-Roman afterlife was the idea that justice would be served after death. This chapter outlines the manifestations of that idea of justice in a range of forms from the positive vision of eternal existence in the Elysian Fields to the negative images of criminals suffering tortures without end or relief. Many of the essential concepts of pagan eschatological thought emerged in philosophical and literary texts written in Greek. Elite Roman authors of the late Republic and imperial periods appropriated these ideas to send a strongly moralised message in terms of rewards and punishments in the afterlife. Central texts include Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis and Virgil’s Aeneid Book 6 along with Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Statius’ Thebaid. The treatment of the afterlife in these works paved the way for Christianity’s shift from the elite focus of the classical world to include any and everyone in the scope of just deserts after death.

Drawing on both Statius’s Thebaid and Boccaccio’s Teseida, TheKnight’s Tale uncomfortably sutures the horrors of epic tragedy to the idealism of chivalric romance, inflecting both with the philosophical ambitions of Boethius’s Consolation. This chapter traces the modern engagement with the tale as a history of attempts to understand the tensions produced by its multiple sources, genres, and rhetorical registers, and explores how accounts of its form inflect and are inflected by accounts of its politics. Politics here, as in other Canterbury Tales, is as much a matter of gender and sexuality as it is of class, rule, and social order. Moreover, the problems posed by aesthetic and political form become problems of how to understand the relations among the text, its pilgrim narrator, and the author. Beginning with the high formalist moment of postwar criticism, the chapter follows the development of ideology critique and of feminist and psychoanalytic criticism, each of which remains attuned to earlier formalist questions. TheKnight’s Tale that emerges from this history is a text of great aesthetic ambition, whose aims are as much reflected in its incoherences as in its formalist impulses.

Critics have typically failed to appreciate the importance of the sin of sloth in Dante’s biography, as well as its pervasive presence in his Christian moral vision. This chapter demonstrates that Peraldus’s treatise ‘De acedia’ profoundly influenced Dante’s poetic representation of sloth. It opens up the depth and breadth of contemporary understandings of acedia enabling us to understand sloth as, indeed, a scholar and a poet’s sin.

Two key narrative dramas occur in the terrace of sloth: the acute fervour of the penitent slothful and, framing this, Dante-character’s intellectual zeal for knowledge. Virgil’s three doctrinal lectures (XVII, 73– XVIII, 87) – on the moral structure of Purgatory, on the nature of love, and on free will and moral responsibility – are not, then, parenthetical to the terrace’s drama. Rather, they are represented symbolically by the dream of the Siren (XVIII, 130–45 and XIX, 1–69).

Dante’s first sin in Inferno I may be identified as tepidity and, more precisely, as the sub-vice of ignavia. Likewise, Dante’s confession in the Earthly Paradise is principally a sin of omission, with the Siren’s call providing a psychological dichotomy with the desire for Beatrice. Sloth is also the post-conversion sin of Statius, Dante’s poetic cypher.

This chapter demonstrates the significance of avarice in Dante’s Christian ethics, and in his own moral biography. As Peraldus’s treatise ‘De avaritia’ demonstrates, the sin of avarice may include a disordered love of power and knowledge as well as of wealth, and its opposing vice of prodigality. In particular, amor filiorum [the love of children] is highlighted as a perilous occasion to avarice.

Amor filiorum is the interpretative key to Dante’s terrace of avarice, which is structured chiastically around the figure of Hugh Capet at its centre (Purg. xx, 40–96). The examples of poverty (16–33) and avarice (97–123) all concern the impact of poverty on family dependents; the shewolf (4–15) and the poor shepherds (124–41) emphasise the failure of the Church’s pastors to protect their flock from avarice; the prologue (1–3) and epilogue (142–51) concern the avaricious desire for knowledge. Hugh Capet’s genealogy of ancestral line (Purg. XX) is framed by the avaricious Ottobono dei Fieschi’s genealogy of popes (Purg. XIX) and the prodigal Statius’s genealogy of ethical poets (Purg. XXI–XXII).

Through his poetic cypher Statius, Dante implies that avarice (in its subspecies, and opposing vice, prodigality) was his own sin, and the cause of his overthrow by the she-wolf in Inferno I.

This chapter explores the idea of the gift found in the classical writers and philosophers most widely read in central medieval Europe. It explores the explicit philosophical and moral treatments of generosity found in Seneca’s De beneficiis and Cicero’s De officiis, as well as the role played by gifts in literature, from Virgil’s Aeneid to the poems of Ovid. The chapter concludes by looking at how classical ideas about generosity were taken up by early Christian writers.

Chapter 5 looks at funeral denial and perversion in Statius’ Thebaid. The discussion of these motifs in Statius’ poem focuses on Creon’s funeral abnegation decree at Thebaid 11.661-4. This point marks the official moment when death rites are denied, but the theme has been building steadily over the course of the epic. The chapter also considers a series of bizarre funeral perversions, particularly the funerals for the fallen Argive leaders, all of whom receive a warping of traditional rites. It examines also the role of women and their attempts to provide funerals for their loved ones, specifically Hypsipyle, Argia and Antigone, and the Argive women. The final section details Iris’ ‘preservation’ of the dead Argive leaders, and the strange case of Maeon’s corpse in book 3.

Chapter 2 is a detailed examination of three scenes that target the most brutal form of epic mistreatment: decapitation and further abuses aimed at the severed head. The first section analyses the death and abuse of Pompey in Lucan’s BC 8. It turns next to abuses in the second half of Statius’ Thebaid: first Tydeus’ cannibalizing of Melanippus’ head in book 8, and second the Thebans’ abuse of Tydeus’ own corpse in book 9. The last section treats the decapitation of the Carthaginian general’s ally Asbyte by Theron in Silius’ Punica 2, and Hannibal’s subsequent abuse of Theron’s corpse in retaliation for Theron’s slaying of Asbyte. These scenes are all built explicitly upon model scenes in the Iliad and Aeneid which the later epicists have infused with post mortem abuse and grotesquery either ignored or only insinuated in the earlier poems. Through consideration of the ways in which Lucan, Statius, and Silius expand upon their models, this chapter offers a vivid glimpse into the evolution of the motif of corpse mistreatment from the ‘classic’ texts of Homer and Virgil, who had sought (in unique ways) to set a limit on the level of violence congruent with the world of epic.

The Epilogue briefly explores some of the ramifications of a provocative recent article on the aesthetic spectacle of violence in Statius’ Thebaid and modern action film. While acknowledging the central importance of aesthetics in literary depictions of violence, the Epilogue argues that allusions to contemporary historical violence that punctuate ‘fictionalized’ epics like Statius’ Thebaid ask us to think more critically about abuses in the real world, problematizing, perhaps, our role as detached audience.