This article examines the Greek goddess Hygieia by looking at her identity, cult status in the ancient world and subsequent scholarly reception. Should she be viewed as a goddess or a personification? By studying Hygieia primarily as a concept of health within ancient medicine, as well as a personification and a goddess, it will be argued that…[Read more]

In this paper, I argue that Hygieia has to be viewed as a full goddess in Greek religion and medicine, with a special focus on her position within the Asklepios cult. I will examine her identity, to which scholars attribute several labels like goddess, abstraction and personification. I further argue that Hygieia’s role in performing incubation r…[Read more]

The present paper aims to investigate the role of anthropology in the development of Ritual Studies as an inter-disciplinary platform, with a focus on ritual dynamics by using a historiographic description, focusing on thetransition of Greco-Roman to Christian culture. This study attempts to shed light not only on the contributionof anthropology…[Read more]

Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy creates a subtle apologia for the “middling sort” by challenging the socially constructed predicates of aristocratic privilege. A scrivener’s son, Kyd undertsood oeconomia, or household management, as both the means for material advancement among the “middling sort” and a potential threat to aristocratic insular…[Read more]

Examines Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors and the epistemological challenges of differentiating twins in light of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, specifically his theories of substance and individuation.

Shortly after publishing the first edition of his Essays in 1597, Francis Bacon drafted De sapientia veterum, a series of unpublished essays designed to re-read classical mythology as indicative of political and scientific truths. An early, if partial, expression of Bacon’s project to facilitate mastery over the natural order, De sapientia has c…[Read more]

This essay examines English Renaissance chess manuals in order to understand why chess, a game that encourages subterfuge and stratagem, was nonetheless figured as the paradigmatic example of a virtuous pastime. Particular attention is given to da Odenara Damiano’s The Pleasaunt and Wittie Playe of the Cheasts (1564), Arthur Saul’s The Famous Gam…[Read more]

Sometime in the second century CE, Pausanias of Magnesia (modern-day Turkey) wrote the Description of Greece. Ostensibly a tour of the places to see on the Greek mainland, the Description also provides historical accounts related to the topography through which Pausanias moves. Little attention has been given to how these building blocks of…[Read more]

This article examines Mary Magdalene’s biblical identity and poetic representation in selected sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish texts. An alternative reading or “re-visioning” (Adrienne Rich’s term) of the narratives that tell her story reclaims her figure from masculinist characterizations of Mary Magdalene that have made an enduring…[Read more]

The present article examines the Corpus Leidense, the group of eight Ciceronian treatises among which the De natura deorum was also transmitted, focusing on its archetype. The second and longer section contains the first complete list of the 174 identified manuscripts of De natura deorum, with 57 new items added to the 117 already listed by Pease…[Read more]

Recent scholarship has done much to challenge the long-held antipathy towards Pausanias, even if some of the best studies appear “enamored not so much of Pausanias himself as they are of the idea of Pausanias”. As one of the leading new Pausaniacs, Greta Hawes has been at the vanguard of efforts to get the measure of this storied landscape. Her…[Read more]

In this book chapter, Dr. Davis examines the depiction of a dissimulated desire for material improvement (mejora) as it is expressed in the epic poetry of imperial Spain, particularly in Alonso de Ercilla’s La Araucana. She shows that within the aristocratic context of the times, the desire for personal betterment or “mejora” is always contingent…[Read more]

The nautical motif of the ex-voto (votive offering) is a lyric genre that reflects poetically the possible experience of a shipwreck survivor. Paradoxically, many of the poets who evoke the perils of sea travel never left Spain or, at most, sailed only the waters of the Mediterranean. Their writing of the sea remained consistently codified in…[Read more]

The biographical trajectory of the Franco-Flemish composer Josquin des Prez can be described as exciting and his musical contribution as transcendent in an era of sublime creativity that coincided with the artistic and intellectual rediscovery of the values of classical Greco-Latin antiquity. A contemporary of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo,…[Read more]

In his response to the Dauphin, his threats before Harfleur’s walls, and his St. Crispin’s Day oration, Henry V deploys what we might call proleptic histories of the present as a means of rhetorical persuasion. Henry invites his audiences, that is, to imagine themselves in the future, understanding the present as part of their own history. Hen…[Read more]

In this early article, written in the wake of the publication of Alessandro Martinengo’s _La astrología en la obra de Quevedo_ (Madrid: Alhambra, 1983), Dr. Davis focuses on the astrological tropes in a Quevedo sonnet on the nativity of Christ to see whether this poetic text can shed additional light on the poet’s documented penchant for…[Read more]

Professor Davis’s early article on appropriations of the Indies by Spanish poets who remained in Spain invites us to contemplate a body of poetry that plays the idea of American treasures against the value of true, spiritual riches.

Several of Francisco de Quevedo’s hagiographic poems are puzzling because of their irreverent tone. Edward M. Wilson and Jose Manuel Blecua both noted that “la relacion entre las dos caras de un Quevedo es cuestión difícil y delicada para los modernos;” indeed, the writer’s particular blend of “las burlas con las veras” has attracted attention s…[Read more]

This essay analyzes the work of the poetic function as defined by Roman Jakobson in poems by Francisco de Quevedo that concern themselves with the trope of the rending of the rocks at the moment of Christ’s death on the cross, and in other poetic texts of Quevedo.

Omani students were introduced to Independent Learning Tools, such as MyELT, Moodle, and MS Teams, during the Covid-19 pandemic. They used these tools for their study throughout the pandemic. Hence, this research investigated how satisfied were Omani students with independent learning tools during Covid-19. This study is significant because it…[Read more]