The Poet Prince


Book Description

The Son of Man shall choose When the time returns for the Poet Prince. He will inspire the hearts and minds of the people So as to illuminate the path of service And show them the Way. This is his legacy, This, and to know a very great love. Worldwide controversy surrounds author Maureen Paschal as she promotes her new bestseller—the explosive account of her discovery of a gospel written in Jesus’ own hand. But a scandalous headline about her lover, Bérenger Sinclair, shatters Maureen’s plans and sends her to Florence. In Tuscany, Maureen and Bérenger seek out their spiritual teacher Destino, who insists the besieged couple study one of history’s great Poet Princes: Lorenzo de’ Medici, the godfather of the Italian Renaissance. Bérenger is a Poet Prince of the ancient bloodline prophecy, and even across the centuries, his fate is intertwined with Lorenzo de’ Medici’s. Bérenger must uncover the heretical secrets of the Medici family—and the shocking truth behind the birth of the Renaissance—if he is to fulfill his own destiny. These heretical secrets were hidden for a reason, and there are those who would stop at nothing to prevent Bérenger’s assumption of his rightful role. The Renaissance comes vividly to life as Maureen decodes the clues contained within the great masterpieces of Lorenzo the Magnificent’s friends: Donatello, Botticelli, and Michelangelo. Maureen uncovers truths connected to the legend of Longinus Gaius, the Roman centurion who used pierced the crucified Jesus with his spear. Could Longinus Gaius, doomed to live forever, be someone she knows? Could his infamous Spear of Destiny, sought even by Hitler, be the key to Bérenger’s fate? As Maureen and Bérenger race to find the answers, someone is after them, hell-bent on settling a five-hundred-year old blood feud and destroying the heresy once and for all. Rich in Kathleen McGowan’s signature insights into art, architecture, and history and set in the beauty of Renaissance and present-day Italy, this is a spiritual detective story of the highest order. The Truth Against the World!




Goblin Market


Book Description




The Ming Prince and Daoism


Book Description

Scholars of Daoism in the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) have paid particular attention to the interaction between the court and certain Daoist priests and to the political results of such interaction; the focus has been on either emperors or Daoist masters. Yet in the Ming era, a special group of people patronized Daoism and Daoist establishments: these were the members of the imperial clan, who were enfeoffed as as princes. By illuminating the role the Ming princes played in local religion, Richard G.W Wang demonstrates in 'The Ming Prince and Daoism' that the princedom sa served to mediate between official religious policy and the commooners' interests ... . Locally, the Ming princes played an important cultural role as well by promoting the development of local religions. This book is the first to explore the interaction between Ming princes as religious patrons and local Daoism. Barred by imperial law from any serious political or military engagement, the Ming princes were ex officio managers of state rituals at the local level, with Daoist priests as key performers. Moreover, institutionally, most regular ceremonies related to a prince's life, were mandated to be conducted by Daoist musician-dancers, and as a result the princely courtly rites were characterized by a Daoist flavor. For this reason the princes became very closely involved in Daoist clerical and liturgical life.







Matter and Making in Early English Poetry


Book Description

This revisionist literary history of early court poetry illuminates late-medieval and early modern theories of literary production.




The Complete Poems of John Donne


Book Description

The Poems of John Donne is one volume paperback edition of the poems of John Donne (1572-1631) based on a comprehensive re-evaluation of his work from composition to circulation and reception. Donne’s output is tremendously varied in style and form and demonstrates his ability to exercise his rhetorical capabilities according to context and occasion. This edition aims to present the text of all his known poems, from the epigrams, songs and satires written for fellow young men about town, to the more mature verse-epistles and memorial elegies written for his patrons. The Longman Annotated English Poets series traditionally aims to present poems in chronological order; in this edition, however, the principle has been observed only within generic sections. This organisation reproduces the manner in which Donne’s original readers first encountered the poems in the various manuscripts of his elegies and satires that circulated in Donne’s lifetime. Volume One contains the Epigrams, Verse Letters to Friends, Love Lyrics, Love Elegies and Satires; Volume Two contains the religious poems, Wedding Celebrations, Verse Epistles to Patronesses, Commemorations, and the Anniversaries. The lyrics have been arranged alphabetically for ease of reference and because, in all but a few cases, precise date of composition is impossible to determine. Each poem has extensive editorial commentary designed to put the twenty-first century reader in possession of all that is necessary fully to appreciate Donne’s work. A substantial headnote sets each poem in its historical and literary context, while the annotations give detailed guidance on the wealth of classical and religious allusions and give full representation to the literary, historical and philosophical culture out of which the poems grew. In keeping with the traditions of the series, Donne’s own text has been modernised in punctuation and spelling except where to do so would alter or disrupt a rhyme.




Coterie Poetics and the Beginnings of the English Literary Tradition


Book Description

In Coterie Poetics and the Beginnings of the English Literary Tradition, R. D. Perry reveals how poetic coteries formed and maintained the English literary tradition. Perry shows that, from Geoffrey Chaucer to Edmund Spenser, the poets who bridged the medieval and early modern periods created a profusion of coterie forms as they sought to navigate their relationships with their contemporaries and to the vernacular literary traditions that preceded them. Rather than defining coteries solely as historical communities of individuals sharing work, Perry reframes them as products of authors signaling associations with one another across time and space, in life and on the page. From Geoffrey Chaucer’s associations with both his fellow writers in London and with his geographically distant French contemporaries, to Thomas Hoccleve’s emphatic insistence that he was “aqweyntid” with Chaucer even after Chaucer’s death, to John Lydgate’s formations of “virtual coteries” of a wide range of individuals alive and dead who can only truly come together on the page, the book traces how writers formed the English literary tradition by signaling social connections. By forming coteries, both real and virtual, based on shared appreciation of a literary tradition, these authors redefine what should be valued in that tradition, shaping and reshaping it accordingly. Perry shows how our notion of the English literary tradition came to be and how it could be imagined otherwise.




Hesiod: The Other Poet


Book Description

Hesiod: The Other Poet is a study dealing with the role of Hesiod in the imagination and the collective memory of the ancient Greeks. Its main hypothesis is that Hesiod's image was to a large degree formed by the picture of Homer: Hesiod is decidedly different when presented as allied with, opposed to or simply without Homer. Following this approach, Hesiod is investigated as a moral and philosophical authority, a locus informed with values and qualities, a concept in literary-critical discourse, and more generally as a cultural and panhellenic icon constructed and reconstructed by later Greek authors who employed and so re-created him in their own texts.




Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes


Book Description

In this study of Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes, Perkins argues that despite the view of Hoccleve's politics and poetics as conventional, servile and naive, it is in fact deeply engaged in the political and literary currents of the early 15th century.