Over a century has passed since Menendez Pidal's initial studies pointed out the existence of a common poetic tradition that flourished in the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Ages. Since then, numerous investigations have been conducted, which have deepened and illuminated our understanding of early Iberian traditional lyricism.

Debates on the origins of Hispanic lyric poetry have revolved around two main schools of thought: the individualista (individualist), which posits that popular poetry derives from learned written poetry, as seen in the essential works of Alfred Jeanroy and Aurelio Roncaglia; and the tradicionalista (traditionalist), which suggests the presence of an oral poetry of popular origin, as seen in the fundamental works of Ramon Menendez Pidal and Margit Frenk. Currently, while the debate between them is still ongoing, the presence of an early traditional oral poetry has been widely accepted by scholars.

Menendez Pidal affirmed the existence of an ancient common tradition that nourished the various poetic traditions that emerged over the centuries, across different areas of the Peninsula, framed within various cultures and languages. The scholar asserted that, beside the Latin poetry composed by clerics during the High Middle Ages, there existed a lyric poetry in vulgar Latin and the primitive Romance languages. This poetry, sung by the unlettered masses, was a type of lyric that no one considered worth writing down (2014: 250), a lyric that had lived for centuries in a ‘latent state’ (en estado latente) (2014: 251).

Even more surprising than the recent spate of publicity given by international Anglophone newspapers to Isabel Fargo Cole's translation of Bunte Steine (Motley Stones, 2021 [1853]) is their common celebration of Adalbert Stifter as the defining European writer of the more-thanhuman world. This is a writer whose friends characterized his work as “kleinliche Detailmalerei unwesentlicher Dinge” (petty detail paintings of unimportant things) and whose reception outside of Central Europe has been largely restricted to academia. This recent embrace of Stifter by a broader audience owes something to the renewed recognition by contemporary pandemic-stricken readers of the ecological importance of the dimensionally insignificant (relative to human magnitude). The insights that Stifter makes into these relationships and the awe that he reserves for small things are derived in no small part from his engagement with geological matters and methodologies through which inquiry into everyday stones leads to earth-magnitude phenomena. In the following, I scrutinize Stifter's motley, multi-faceted stones as they inform his aesthetic geology but also as they are informed by and deformed under the political duress, in particular regarding the public debate around Jewish emancipation and assimilation, that becomes manifest in his novella Abdias (Abdias, 1842).

When the curtain rises in Die Walküre, we see a primitive house built around a huge ash tree. A storm is dying down and a warrior unlatches the door and stumbles in, wounded and weaponless; Wagner says that “he has the appearance of someone overwrought by excessive struggle; his clothes and the way he looks suggest he is a fugitive.” This is Siegmund, the great hero that Wotan has fathered and raised and the key player in the god's “great idea” for snatching the Ring from Fafner and ensuring that Alberich never regains it. His part in Wotan's plotting has all but destroyed him.

A moment later a woman enters from a back room: Sieglinde. Her life, too, has been torn from her thanks to her unasked-for role in Wotan's scheme. Motherless, lost to the rest of her family, forced into a marriage that is little more than legally sanctioned rape, she can barely acknowledge her own existence. When Siegmund asks her name she “wants to give an honest answer, but thinks better of it.” She exists in the third person: this house and this woman are Hunding's own, she tells him.

Die Walküre has always been the popular favorite of the Ring dramas, but, as Dahlhaus writes, its “overwhelming spell … emanates less from the whole, for it is no whole, than from individual acts, the first and the third.” That spell is even more selective than Dahlhaus suggests; what remain most vividly in memory from the first act, which is often and effectively presented by itself as a concert piece, are the matchless delicacy of its evocation of dawning love and the theatrical grandiosity of its climax, the door's opening to let spring flood into the hall, Siegmund's heroic but tender Winterstürme, and his drawing the sword from the tree.

The phrase “Gods and mortals” conventionally refers to two distinct classes of beings: gods who live forever and humans who do not. This concept of divine immortality is so embedded in Western views of divinity that imagining gods without eternal life feels almost inconceivable. In Abrahamic religions, immortality is central to the conception of God, who may be invoked as ‘the Living One’, ‘the Everlasting God’, and ‘the eternal God’. Humans, in contrast, have faced death since their expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

The gods of ancient Greece, too, are depicted as immortal. The Iliad emphatically stresses Aphrodite's everlasting nature when she is wounded by Diomedes’ spear:

In ancient Greek, the gods are known as a-thanatoi, the un-dying or immortal ones, and the ichor in their veins is a-m-brotos, un-dead or immortal. Similarly, the gods of the Vedas are called the ‘immortal gods’, and Zoroastrian tradition speaks of the Aməša Spəṇta, ‘the bounteous immortals’ emanating from Ahura Mazdā (already mentioned in the Old Avestan Yasna Haptaŋhāiti, Yasna 35.1). Meanwhile, humans are consistently labeled as mortal: when the Dawn rises from her slumber in the Homeric epics, she does so to bring light to mortals (brotoi) and immortals (athanatoi) alike (Il. 11.2; 19.2). The contrast also appears in Roman tradition. For example, the celebrated epitaph of the Old Latin Roman poet Naevius opens with the words: “If it were right for immortals to weep over mortals, the divine Camenae [i.e. Muses] would weep for Naevius the poet.”

This book investigates the transformations that occurred in English religious and intellectual culture from at least the 1650s to the early eighteenth century in light of the triangular circulation and reception of books and ideas between England, France and the Dutch Republic made possible by the attainment of centrality in the history of mediation by print culture and by the peculiar dynamics of the book market in that transnational context. I argue that such a process of intellectual and textual exchange, which involved not just Latin-speaking educated readers but also those in England who were versed in modern European languages, was a decisive factor in enabling a process of ‘destabilization’ and ‘reconfiguration’ of English culture. Contemporaries largely perceived these processes as a consequence of the spread of ‘atheism’, ‘deism’ and ‘scepticism’, and largely cognised change by setting it within the broader cultural framework of the confrontation between ‘ancients’ and ‘moderns’.

Unlike scholarly attempts to square such a process within the spatial- temporal coordinates either of the ‘crisis of the European mind’ or of the Enlightenment, what I dubbed the ‘crisis of English mind’ would be better understood as a period in which various long-term and short-term national and transnational disrupting dynamics – spanning the agony of ‘Christianised’ Aristotelianism and the inter-confessional religious conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – concurred to generate a set of debates that tackled some fundamental issues of early modern culture, religion and society.

What sort of mythology is Old Norse mythology and how can one best characterize it? As it turns out the constructedness of the category means that these questions are more difficult to answer than to pose, and one must approach them from two different directions. The first, typological, question requires generalization and abstraction. To answer it, one would, as a starting point, need a typology of mythologies and then proceed by comparing Norse mythology with the kinds of mythologies included in the typology and, based on commonalities, situate Norse myth within this framework. However, commonly recognized typologies of mythologies are rare. The most popular typology, perhaps the only widely recognized one, uses culture as a basis for classification and sees a close relationship between culture and language or even language families. Within this typology one recognizes Greek mythology, Babylonian mythology, Egyptian mythology, Mayan mythology, etc. as distinct mythologies. Using this approach, the mythology we find reflected in Old Norse sources would be classified as Scandinavian, Germanic or Indo-European mythology, depending on the level of abstraction. This perspective emphasizes similarities and commonalities, making it less suitable for addressing the second question, which relates to characterization and highlights distinguishing features rather than commonalities, or at least characteristic combinations of common features.

The question of characterization can be answered descriptively by listing and analyzing features of the texts we know, such as the names of the gods and the various classes of mythological beings, and perhaps their relations to one another as a discrete system. Regardless of whether the material is studied in its entirety as a system or the study focuses on a particular aspect of the system, this appears to be the most common approach to Norse myth and mythology within Old Norse studies. Many past studies have shown that this can be a fruitful approach to the material at hand.

In Ingmar Bergman's 1957 film The Seventh Seal, set in fourteenth-century Sweden, Mia advises her husband Jof that they should travel with a knight for company when they venture into the woods. In the ninth century, the Frankish monk Lupus of Ferrieres wrote to a friend to advise him to gather a band of protectors before setting out to visit him. Both the movie and the medieval letter imply that there is a need for groups of strong men in dangerous times. Indeed, the “band of brothers” is one of the most popular images of male friendship. We need only think of Jaime and Bronn in Game of Thrones, or the Fellowship of the Ring, or the numerous depictions of the Knights of the Round of Table. As scholars of medievalism have argued, these men-atarms project an image of medieval masculinity founded upon strength and violence. While gender theorists emphasize that concepts of masculinity and femininity have varied across time and space, this construction of manliness is not without medieval precedents. As Antiquity gave way to the Early Middle Ages, martial valor became one of the defining images of masculinity, but, as Guy Halsall has written, it derived its acceptability from the service of warriors to the holders of imperial and royal authority.