Philological Quarterly articles from March 2001

Philological Quarterly archives from March 2001

The naming of Beowulf and Ecgtheow's feud.
March 22, 2001... One odd feature of Beowulf, which has attracted some notice but as yet no detailed explanation, is the poet's delay in naming his main character. (1) He identifies him first, at home among the Geats hearing of Grendel's ravages, only as...

Changing senses in Genesis B.
March 22, 2001... In Genesis 3:5 the Tempter presents the forbidden apple to Eve as he makes her this well-known promise: "For God doth know that in what day soever you shall eat thereof, your eyes shall be opened: and you shall be as Gods, knowing good and...

Interpreting female agency and responsibility in The Miller's Tale and The Merchant's Tale.(Canterbury Tales)
March 22, 2001... 1 Geoffrey Chaucer frequently displays keen interest in questions of female agency and responsibility by rendering his female characters at key moments in silences, deferred answers, absences, and unexpected submissiveness. (1) Chaucer's...

Milton's purgatorio.(John Milton)
March 22, 2001... Because Milton was preoccupied with the shape of his own poetic career, many of the works he wrote before Paradise Lost reflect his long-term plan to write a great epic and his anxiousness about when and how he would make himself ready to...

Nostalgia, the classics, and the Intimations Ode: Wordsworth's forgotten education.(William Wordsworth)
March 22, 2001... Between 1819 and 1824 Wordsworth undertook a translation of Virgil's Aeneid, which eventually included Books 1 to 3 nearly complete and only two further, unconnected passages: a brief fragment (six lines in English) from Book 4, and a more...