Luther's lives: Two contemporary accounts of Martin Luther

This volume brings together two important contemporary accounts of the life of Martin Luther in a confrontation that had been postponed for more than 450 years. The first of these accounts was written after Luther's death, when it was rumoured that demons had seized the reformer on his deathbed and dragged him off to Hell. In response to these rumours, Luther's friend and colleague, Philip Melanchthon, wrote and published a brief encomium of the reformer in 1548. A completely new translation of this text appears in this book. It was in response to Melanchthon's work that Johannes Cochlaeus completed and published his own monumental life of Luther in 1549, which is translated and made available in English for the first time in this volume. After witnessing Luther's declaration before Charles V at the Diet of Worms, Cochlaeus sought out Luther and debated with him. However, the confrontation left him convinced that Luther was an impious and malevolent man. Consequently, over the next twenty-five years, Cochlaeus fought vigorously against the influence of the Reformation. Such is the detail and importance of Cochlaeus' life of Luther that for an eyewitness account of the Reformation - and the beginnings of the Catholic Counter-Reformation - there is simply no other historical document to compare. Published in collaboration with The Sohmer-Hall Foundation, this book also supplies introductory texts to the lives of both Cochlaeus and Melanchthon, plus comprehensive annotation for readers who wish to make a broader study of the period. These translations will be essential reading for students and academics of the Reformation and all early modern historians interested in this fascinating period of religious history

Lois Mailou Jones, Diasporic Art Practice, and Africa in the 20th Century

<p>This dissertation, Loïs Mailou Jones, Diasporic Art Practice, and Africa in the 20th Century, investigates the evolving dialogue between twentieth-century African-American artists and Africa--its objects, peoples, diasporas, and topography. The four chapters follow the career of artist Loïs Mailou Jones (1905-1998) and focus on periods when ideas about blackness in an African-American context and its connection to Africa were at the forefront of artistic and cultural discourses. Chapter 1 traces African-American artists contact with African art during the first decades of the twentieth century. Chapter 2 examines Jones's use of Africa in her art produced at the start of her career (1920s -1940s) and repositions her in relation to the Harlem Renaissance and Négritude movements. Chapter 3 considers Jones's engagements with the African Diaspora via travels to France, the Caribbean, and Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, voyages that I argue result in the creation of a Black Diasporic art practice predicated upon the act of viewing. Chapter 4 critiques the signifying grasp of Africa in African American art. By looking at Jones's turn to pastiche as an aesthetic choice and cultural commentary, the chapter argues that that the possibility of a seamless reconciliation of Africa in African American art is impossible. Where the limited scholarly discourse on the subject has emphasized a heritage-based relationship between Black artists and Africa, this project's cross-cultural approach is one of the first to consider the relationship between Africa and Black artists that goes beyond looking for African retentions in African American culture. In doing so the project also suggests an alternative to the internationalization of American artists in African, rather than European terms. Moreover, though Jones is broadly cited within African American art history beyond monographic considerations her work has yet to be critically examined particularly in regards to larger debates concerning blackness and the African Diaspora.</p>Dissertatio

Rupert Brooke, Charles Sorley, Isaac Rosenberg, & Wilfred Owen: Classical Connections

Abstract This book examines how, when, and why four First World War poets engaged with Greek and Roman antiquity. Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, and Charles Sorley all died in the war. They came from diverse social, educational, and cultural backgrounds but for each of the writers engagement with classical material was decisive in shaping their war poetry. The world views and cultural hinterlands of Brooke and Sorley were framed by the Greek and Latin texts they had studied at school, whereas for Owen, who struggled with Latin, classical texts were a part of his aspirational literary imagination. Rosenberg’s education was limited but he encountered some Greek and Roman literature through translations, and through mediations in English literature. The various ways in which the poets engaged with classical literature are analysed in the commentaries, which are designed to be accessible to classicists and to users from other subject areas. The extensive range of connections made by the poets and by subsequent readers is explained in the Introduction to the volume. The commentaries illuminate relationships between the poems and attitudes to the war at the time, in the immediate post-war years, and subsequently. They also probe how individual poems reveal various facets of the poetry of unease, the poetry of survival, and the poetics of war and ecology. Links to the online Oxford Classical Receptions Commentaries will enable readers to follow up their special interests. This volume differs from the shorter volume Greek and Roman Antiquity in First World War Poetry; Making Connections in that it covers the whole output of the four poets, and not just their war poems

Luther's lives: Two contemporary accounts of Martin Luther

This volume brings together two important contemporary accounts of the life of Martin Luther in a confrontation that had been postponed for more than 450 years. The first of these accounts was written after Luther's death, when it was rumoured that demons had seized the reformer on his deathbed and dragged him off to Hell. In response to these rumours, Luther's friend and colleague, Philip Melanchthon, wrote and published a brief encomium of the reformer in 1548. A completely new translation of this text appears in this book. It was in response to Melanchthon's work that Johannes Cochlaeus completed and published his own monumental life of Luther in 1549, which is translated and made available in English for the first time in this volume. After witnessing Luther's declaration before Charles V at the Diet of Worms, Cochlaeus sought out Luther and debated with him. However, the confrontation left him convinced that Luther was an impious and malevolent man. Consequently, over the next twenty-five years, Cochlaeus fought vigorously against the influence of the Reformation. Such is the detail and importance of Cochlaeus' life of Luther that for an eyewitness account of the Reformation - and the beginnings of the Catholic Counter-Reformation - there is simply no other historical document to compare. Published in collaboration with The Sohmer-Hall Foundation, this book also supplies introductory texts to the lives of both Cochlaeus and Melanchthon, plus comprehensive annotation for readers who wish to make a broader study of the period. These translations will be essential reading for students and academics of the Reformation and all early modern historians interested in this fascinating period of religious history