Marie de France
Marie de France ("Mary of France", around 1135-1200) was a poet evidently born in France and living in England during the late 12th century. Virtually nothing is known of her early life, though she wrote a form of continental French[citation needed:] that was copied by Anglo-Norman scribes. Therefore, most of the manuscripts of her work bear Anglo-Norman traits. She also translated some Latin literature and produced an influential version of Aesop's Fables.
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Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont
Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, born Vaimboult was a French teacher, journalist and writer. She is the author of many classic tales for children and youth.
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Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, née Vaimboult était une pédagogue, journaliste et écrivain française. Elle est l'auteur de nombreux contes classiques pour les enfants et la jeunesse. -
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne was a 19th century American novelist and short story writer. He is seen as a key figure in the development of American literature for his tales of the nation's colonial history.
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Shortly after graduating from Bowdoin College, Hathorne changed his name to Hawthorne. Hawthorne anonymously published his first work, a novel titled Fanshawe, in 1828. In 1837, he published Twice-Told Tales and became engaged to painter and illustrator Sophia Peabody the next year. He worked at a Custom House and joined a Transcendentalist Utopian community, before marrying Peabody in 1842. The couple moved to The Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, later moving to Salem, the Berkshires, then to The Wayside in Concord. The Scarlet Letter was pub -
Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343 – 25 October 1400) was an English poet, author, and civil servant best known for The Canterbury Tales. He has been called the "father of English literature", or, alternatively, the "father of English poetry". He was the first writer to be buried in what has since come to be called Poets' Corner, in Westminster Abbey. Chaucer also gained fame as a philosopher and astronomer, composing the scientific A Treatise on the Astrolabe for his 10-year-old son, Lewis. He maintained a career in the civil service as a bureaucrat, courtier, diplomat, and member of parliament.
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Among Chaucer's many other works are The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, The Legend of Good Women, and Troilus and Criseyde. He is seen as crucial i -
Béroul
Béroul was a Norman poet of the twelfth century. Béroul is, by agreement, the name given to the author of a version of the legend of Tristan and Isolde, written in a Norman dialect.
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Béroul était un poète normand du xiie siècle. C'est le nom que l'on donne par convention à l'auteur d'une version en vers de la légende de Tristan et Iseut, écrite dans un dialecte normand. -
Madame de La Fayette
Marie Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne, comtesse de la Fayette
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Christened Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, she was born in Paris to a family of minor but wealthy nobility. At 16, de la Vergne became the maid of honor to Queen Anne of Austria and began also to acquire a literary education from Gilles Ménage, who gave her lessons in Italian and Latin. Ménage would lead her to join the fashionable salons of Madame de Rambouillet and Madeleine de Scudéry. Her father, Marc Pioche de la Vergne, had died a year before, and the same year her mother married Renaud de Sévigné, uncle of Madame de Sévigné, who would remain her lifelong intimate friend.
In 1655, de la Vergne married François Motier, comte de La Fayette, a widowed nobleman some eighteen y -
Francesco Petrarca
Famous Italian poet, scholar, and humanist Francesco Petrarca, known in English as Petrarch, collected love lyrics in Canzoniere .
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People often call Petrarch the earliest Renaissance "father of humanism". Based on Petrarch's works, and to a lesser extent those of Dante Alighieri and Giovanni Boccaccio, Pietro Bembo in the 16th century created the model for the modern Italian language, which the Accademia della Crusca later endorsed. People credit Petrarch with developing the sonnet. They admired and imitated his sonnets, a model for lyrical poems throughout Europe during the Renaissance. Petrarch called the Middle Ages the Dark Ages. -
Guillaume de Lorris
Guillaume de Lorris (fl. 1230) was a French scholar and poet, and was the author of the first section of the Romance of the Rose. Little is known about him, other than that he wrote the earlier section of the poem around 1230, and that the work was completed forty years later by Jean de Meun.
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Juana Inés de la Cruz
Juana Inés de la Cruz was born in a town in the Valley of Mexico to a Creole mother Isabel Ramírez and a Spanish military father, Pedro Manuel de Asbaje. As a child, she learned Nahuatl (Uto-Aztec language spoken in Mexico and Central America) and read and write Spanish in the middle of three years. Thanks to her grandfather's lush library, Juana Inés de la Cruz read the Greek and Roman classics and the theology of the time, she learned Latin in a self-taught way. In 1665, admired for her talent and precocity, she was lady-in-waiting to Leonor Carreto, wife of Viceroy Antonio Sebastián de Toledo. Sponsored by the Marquises of Mancera, she shone in the viceregal court of New Spain for her erudition and versifying ability. In 1667, Juana Inés
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Heliodorus of Emesa
Greek writer Heliodorus of Emesa (now near Homs, Syria) generally dates to the third century AD who is known for the ancient Greek novel or romance called the Aethiopica (the Ethiopian Story) or sometimes "Theagenes and Chariclea".
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According to his own statement, his father's name was Theodosius and he belonged to a family of priests of the sun. Socrates Scholasticus (5th century AD) identifies the author of Aethiopica with a certain Heliodorus, bishop of Trikka. Nicephorus Callistus (14th century) relates that the work was written in the early years of this bishop before he became a Christian and that, when forced either to disown it or resign his bishopric, he preferred resignation. Most scholars reject this identification. -
Margery Kempe
The following biography information provides basic facts and information about the life and history of Margery Kempe, a famous Medieval character:
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Nationality: English
Lifespan: c1373 - c1438
Time Reference: Lived during the reign of the English kings Edward III, Richard II and Henry IV
Date of Birth: She was born Margery Brunham at King's Lynn, Norfolk (then called Bishop's Lynn) in approximately 1373
Family connections : She was the daughter of John Brunham, a wealthy merchant in King's Lynn who was involved in local politics and achieved the position of mayor and Member of Parliament
Education: Margery Kempe was unable to read or write but had people read to her. She dictated her memoirs which were transcribed as 'The Book of Margery Kempe'
Ma -
Mira Jacob
I am the author and illustrator of Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations. My first novel, The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing, was a Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers pick, shortlisted for India’s Tata First Literature Award, and longlisted for the Brooklyn Literary Eagles Prize.
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My writing and drawings have appeared in The New York Times, Electric Literature, Tin House, Literary Hub, Guernica, Vogue, the Telegraph, and Buzzfeed, and I have a drawn column on Shondaland. I am currently the Visiting Professor at The New School, and a founding faculty member of the MFA Program at Randolph College.
If I could travel back in time, I would avoid long journeys by boat and take a pair of tweezers.
The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing is my first novel. -
Simon Armitage
Simon Armitage, whose The Shout was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, has published ten volumes of poetry and has received numerous honors for his work. He was appointed UK Poet Laureate in 2019
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Armitage's poetry collections include Book of Matches (1993) and The Dead Sea Poems (1995). He has written two novels, Little Green Man (2001) and The White Stuff (2004), as well as All Points North (1998), a collection of essays on the north of England. He has produced a dramatised version of Homer's Odyssey and a collection of poetry entitled Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus The Corduroy Kid (which was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize), both of which were published in July 2006. Many of Armitage's poems appear in the AQA (Assessment -
William Congreve
"William Congreve was an English playwright and poet.... William Congreve wrote some of the most popular English plays of the Restoration period of the late 17th century. By the age of thirty, he had written four comedies, including Love for Love (premiered 30 April 1695) and The Way of the World (premiered 1700), and one tragedy, The Mourning Bride (1697).
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Unfortunately, his career ended almost as soon as it began. After writing five plays from his first in 1693 until 1700, he produced no more as public tastes turned against the sort of high-brow sexual comedy of manners in which he specialized. He reportedly was particularly stung by a critique written by Jeremy Collier (A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage), -
Gaiutra Bahadur
Gaiutra Bahadur is an American writer. She is the author of Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture, a personal history of indenture shortlisted in 2014 for the Orwell Prize, the British literary prize for artful political writing. Her debut fiction, the short story “The Stained Veil,” appears in the anthology Go Home! (New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2018).
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Gaiutra was born in Guyana and emigrated with her family to Jersey City, New Jersey when she was six years old. A lyric essay previewing her current book project, which explores the idea of America through its 20th-century entanglements with her home country, runs in the current issue of the Australian literary magazine The Griffith Review. Entitled “Tales of the Sea,” it is also r -
Marguerite de Navarre
Marguerite de Navarre, also known as Marguerite d'Angoulême and Margaret of Navarre, was the queen consort of King Henry II of Navarre. As patron of humanists and reformers, and as an author in her own right, she was an outstanding figure of the French Renaissance. Samuel Putnam called her "The First Modern Woman".
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Chrétien de Troyes
Chrétien de Troyes, commonly regarded as the father of Arthurian romance and a key figure in Western literature, composed in French in the latter part of the twelfth century. Virtually nothing is known of his life. Possibly a native of Troyes, he enjoyed patronage there from the Countess Marie of Champagne before dedicating his last romance to Count Philip of Flanders, perhaps about 1182. His poetry is marked by a learning and a taste for dialectic acquired in Latin schools; but at the same time it reveals a warm human sympathy which breathes life into characters and situations. Whilst much of his matter is inherited from the world of Celtic myth and the events notionally unfold in the timeless reign of King Arthur, the society and customs
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Henry MacKenzie
There is more than one Henry Mackenzie in the Goodreads catalog. This entry is for Henry ^ Mackenzie, Scottish lawyer.
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Henry Mackenzie FRSE was a Scottish lawyer, novelist and writer. He was also known by the sobriquet "Addison of the North." While Mackenzie is now mostly remembered as an author, his principal income came from legal roles, ending in (1804–1831) his post as Comptroller of Taxes for Scotland, a well-paid post which allowed him to indulge his interest in writing. -
Michael Psellus
Michael Psellos or Psellus (Greek: Μιχαήλ Ψελλός, Mikhaēl Psellos) was an eleventh century Byzantine monk, writer, philosopher, politician and historian.
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Suzan-Lori Parks
Suzan-Lori Parks is an award-winning American playwright and screenwriter. She was a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant in 2001, and received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2002. She is married to blues musician Paul Oscher.
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Louise Labé
The precise date of Louise Labé's birth is unknown. She is born somewhere between 1516 (her parents marriage) and 1523 (her mother's death).
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Both her father and her stepmother Antoinette Taillard (whom Pierre Charly married following Etiennette Roybet's death in 1523) were illiterate, but Labé received an education in Latin, Italian and music, perhaps in a convent school.
At the siege of Perpignan, or in a tournament there, she is said to have dressed in male clothing and fought on horseback in the ranks of the Dauphin, afterwards Henry II.
Between 1543 and 1545 she married Ennemond Perrin, a ropemaker.
She became active in a circle of Lyonnais poets and humanists grouped around the figure of Maurice Scève. Her Œuvres were printed in 1555, by t -
Erich Neumann
Erich Neumann (Hebrew: אריך נוימן) was a psychologist, writer, and one of Carl Jung's most gifted students.
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Neumann received his Ph.D. from the University of Berlin in 1927. He practiced analytical psychology in Tel Aviv from 1934 until his death in 1960. For many years, he regularly returned to Zürich, Switzerland to give lectures at the C. G. Jung Institute. He also lectured frequently in England, France and the Netherlands, and was a member of the International Association for Analytical Psychology and president of the Israel Association of Analytical Psychologists.
Erich Neumann contributed greatly to the field of developmental psychology and the psychology of consciousness and creativity. Neumann had a theoretical and philosophical appr -
William Langland
William Langland, (born c. 1330—died c. 1400), presumed author of one of the greatest examples of Middle English alliterative poetry, generally known as Piers Plowman, an allegorical work with a complex variety of religious themes.
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One of the major achievements of Piers Plowman is that it translates the language and conceptions of the cloister into symbols and images that could be understood by the layman. In general, the language of the poem is simple and colloquial, but some of the author’s imagery is powerful and direct.
Little is known of Langland’s life: he is thought to have been born somewhere in the region of the Malvern Hills, in Worcestershire, and if he is to be identified with the “dreamer” of the poem, he may have been educated -
Anne Bradstreet
English poet Anne Dudley Bradstreet, wife of Simon Bradstreet, wrote several collections of verse, including The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650).
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People first published this first notable colonial woman. Her work much influenced Puritans in her time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Br... -
Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343 – 25 October 1400) was an English poet, author, and civil servant best known for The Canterbury Tales. He has been called the "father of English literature", or, alternatively, the "father of English poetry". He was the first writer to be buried in what has since come to be called Poets' Corner, in Westminster Abbey. Chaucer also gained fame as a philosopher and astronomer, composing the scientific A Treatise on the Astrolabe for his 10-year-old son, Lewis. He maintained a career in the civil service as a bureaucrat, courtier, diplomat, and member of parliament.
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Among Chaucer's many other works are The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, The Legend of Good Women, and Troilus and Criseyde. He is seen as crucial i -
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne was a 19th century American novelist and short story writer. He is seen as a key figure in the development of American literature for his tales of the nation's colonial history.
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Shortly after graduating from Bowdoin College, Hathorne changed his name to Hawthorne. Hawthorne anonymously published his first work, a novel titled Fanshawe, in 1828. In 1837, he published Twice-Told Tales and became engaged to painter and illustrator Sophia Peabody the next year. He worked at a Custom House and joined a Transcendentalist Utopian community, before marrying Peabody in 1842. The couple moved to The Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, later moving to Salem, the Berkshires, then to The Wayside in Concord. The Scarlet Letter was pub -
Christopher Marlowe
Christopher "Kit" Marlowe (baptised 26 February 1564) was an English dramatist, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era. The foremost Elizabethan tragedian next to William Shakespeare, he is known for his magnificent blank verse, his overreaching protagonists, and his own mysterious and untimely death.
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The author's Wikipedia page. -
Chrétien de Troyes
Chrétien de Troyes, commonly regarded as the father of Arthurian romance and a key figure in Western literature, composed in French in the latter part of the twelfth century. Virtually nothing is known of his life. Possibly a native of Troyes, he enjoyed patronage there from the Countess Marie of Champagne before dedicating his last romance to Count Philip of Flanders, perhaps about 1182. His poetry is marked by a learning and a taste for dialectic acquired in Latin schools; but at the same time it reveals a warm human sympathy which breathes life into characters and situations. Whilst much of his matter is inherited from the world of Celtic myth and the events notionally unfold in the timeless reign of King Arthur, the society and customs
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Alexander Pope
People best remember The Rape of the Lock (1712) and The Dunciad (1728), satirical mock-epic poems of English writer Alexander Pope.
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Ariel, a sylph, guards the heroine of The Rape of the Lock of Alexander Pope.
People generally regard Pope as the greatest of the 18th century and know his verse and his translation of Homer. After William Shakespeare and Alfred Tennyson, he ranks as third most frequently quoted in the language. Pope mastered the heroic couplet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexand... -
Aphra Behn
Aphra Behn, or Ayfara Behn, of the first professional women authors in English on Britain wrote plays, poetry, and her best known work, the prose fiction Oroonoko (1688).
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Aphra Behn was a prolific dramatist of the Restoration and was one of the female. Her contributed to the amatory genre of literature. People sometimes refer to Delarivier Manley, Eliza Haywood, and her as part of "the fair triumvirate of wit."
In reckoning of Adeline Virginia Stephen Woolf, more important total career of Behn produced any particular work. Woolf wrote, "All women together, ought to let flowers fall upon the grave of Aphra Behn … for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds." Victoria Mary Sackville-West called Behn "an inhabitant of Gru -
Margery Kempe
The following biography information provides basic facts and information about the life and history of Margery Kempe, a famous Medieval character:
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Nationality: English
Lifespan: c1373 - c1438
Time Reference: Lived during the reign of the English kings Edward III, Richard II and Henry IV
Date of Birth: She was born Margery Brunham at King's Lynn, Norfolk (then called Bishop's Lynn) in approximately 1373
Family connections : She was the daughter of John Brunham, a wealthy merchant in King's Lynn who was involved in local politics and achieved the position of mayor and Member of Parliament
Education: Margery Kempe was unable to read or write but had people read to her. She dictated her memoirs which were transcribed as 'The Book of Margery Kempe'
Ma -
Geoffrey of Monmouth
born perhaps 1100
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Historia Regum Britanniae circa 1139 of Geoffrey of Monmouth as English chronicler, popularized Arthurian legend and contains the source material for several plays of William Shakespeare.
Geoffrey, a Welsh cleric, figured in the major development and the popularity of tales of king. Much of his work is considered to be false.
People best know Prophetiae Merlini ( Prophecies of Merlin ), his document of attributed quotations, and Vita Merlini ( Life of Merlin ), his poem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffre... -
Heldris de Cornualles
AKA
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Cornuälle, Heldris de
Heldris de Cornouailles
Heldris de Cornuaille
Heldris de Cornuälle
Heldris de Cornvalle
Heldris di Cornovaglia
Heldris of Cornwall -
Dante Alighieri
Dante Alighieri, or simply Dante (May 14/June 13 1265 – September 13/14, 1321), is one of the greatest poets in the Italian language; with the comic story-teller, Boccaccio, and the poet, Petrarch, he forms the classic trio of Italian authors. Dante Alighieri was born in the city-state Florence in 1265. He first saw the woman, or rather the child, who was to become the poetic love of his life when he was almost nine years old and she was some months younger. In fact, Beatrice married another man, Simone di' Bardi, and died when Dante was 25, so their relationship existed almost entirely in Dante's imagination, but she nonetheless plays an extremely important role in his poetry. Dante attributed all the heavenly virtues to her soul and imagi
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Ibn ʿArabi
Note to arabic readers : For the original arabic version of the books, check "other editions" in the book that interests you)
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Universally known by the title of "Muhyi al-Din" (The Reviver of the Religion) and "al-Shaykh al-Akbar" (The Greatest Shaykh) Ibn 'Arabī (Arabic: ابن عربي) (July 28, 1165 - November 10, 1240) was an Arab Sufi Muslim mystic and philosopher. His full name was Abū 'Abdullāh Muḥammad ibn 'Alī ibn Muḥammad ibn al-`Arabī al-Hāṭimī al-Ṭā'ī (أبو عبد الله محمد بن علي بن محمد بن العربي الحاتمي الطائي).
Muhammad ibn al-Arabi and his family moved to Seville when he was eight years old. In 1200 CE, at the age of thirty-five, he left Iberia for good, intending to make the hajj to Mecca. He lived in Mecca for some three years, wher -
Wakefield Master
The Wakefield Mystery Play cycle is the work of many authors, some sourced from the York Cycle. However, the most significant contribution has been attributed to an anonymous author known as the "Wakefield Master." It is believed that his additions include Noah, The First Shepherds' Play, The Second Shepherds' Play, Herod the Great and The Buffeting of Christ. This common authorship is suspected due to a unique thirteen-line rhymed stanza, which is evident in all five texts.
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The term "Wakefield Master" emerged from a need to distinguish some material in the Towneley manuscript from a mass of unexceptional material, and was first coined by Charles Mills Gayley. In 1903, Gayley and Alwin Thaler published an anthology of criticism and dramatic -
Vivant Denon
Dominique Vivant, Baron Denon was a French artist, writer, diplomat, author, and archaeologist. He was appointed as the first Director of the Louvre Museum by Napoleon after the Egyptian campaign of 1798-1801, and is commemorated in the Denon Wing of the modern museum. His two-volume Voyage dans la basse et la haute Egypte ("Journey in Lower and Upper Egypt", 1802), was the foundation of modern Egyptology.
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Andreas Capellanus
Andreas Capellanus (Capellanus meaning "chaplain"), also known as Andrew the Chaplain, and occasionally by a French translation of his name, André le Chapelain, was the 12th-century author of a treatise commonly known as De amore ("About Love"), and often known in English, somewhat misleadingly, as The Art of Courtly Love, though its realistic, somewhat cynical tone suggests that it is in some measure an antidote to courtly love. Little is known of Andreas Capellanus's life, but he is presumed to have been a courtier of Marie de Champagne, and probably of French origin.
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De Amore was written at the request of Marie de Champagne, daughter of King Louis VII of France and of Eleanor of Aquitaine. In it, the author informs a young pupil, Walter, -
Tzvetan Todorov
In Bulgarian Цветан Тодоров. Todorov was a Franco-Bulgarian historian, philosopher and literary theoretician. Among his most influential works is his theory on the fantastic, the uncanny and marvellous.
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John Mandeville
"Jehan de Mandeville", translated as "Sir John Mandeville", is the name claimed by the compiler of a singular book of supposed travels, written in Anglo-Norman French, and published between 1357 and 1371.
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By aid of translations into many other languages it acquired extraordinary popularity. Despite the extremely unreliable and often fantastical nature of the travels it describes, it was used as a work of reference — Christopher Columbus, for example, was heavily influenced by both this work and Marco Polo's earlier Il Milione (Adams 53). -
Kinuko Y. Craft
* Complete list of her book covers.
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Kinuko Y. Craft is one of the most widely respected and well known fantasy artists in the United States today. Her past commissions have included paintings for the book covers of many well known fantasy authors, opera posters, fairy tale books and covers for many national magazines. During her career she has become known for meticulous attention to detail, a passionate love of fine art and a deep knowledge of art history.
Kinuko Y. Craft considers her self a story teller. Her fairy tale books are currently distributed in the USA, other English language countries, Europe, Greece, China and Korea. Her art is also widely licensed on calendars, posters, greeting cards and other consumer goods. Her work has been -
Hugh White
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. This profile may contain books from multiple authors of this name.
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Other authors publishing under this name are:
Hugh White, Strategist
Hugh White, Christian religion -
Wakefield Master
The Wakefield Mystery Play cycle is the work of many authors, some sourced from the York Cycle. However, the most significant contribution has been attributed to an anonymous author known as the "Wakefield Master." It is believed that his additions include Noah, The First Shepherds' Play, The Second Shepherds' Play, Herod the Great and The Buffeting of Christ. This common authorship is suspected due to a unique thirteen-line rhymed stanza, which is evident in all five texts.
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The term "Wakefield Master" emerged from a need to distinguish some material in the Towneley manuscript from a mass of unexceptional material, and was first coined by Charles Mills Gayley. In 1903, Gayley and Alwin Thaler published an anthology of criticism and dramatic -
Shaun Usher
Shaun Usher is a writer, editor, and compulsive collector of remarkable words. He is the author of Letters of Note, an international bestseller that began life as a blog and grew into a celebrated series of books and inspired the live stage show Letters Live, which he has co-produced since 2013. He has published 16 books so far, covering everything from love and grief to music, dogs, and outer space, and in October 2025 will release his 17th, Diaries of Note: 366 Lives, One Day at a Time, a curated journey through a year’s worth of diary entries from history. He lives in Manchester with his wife, Karina, and their three children.
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Joel B. Green
Joel B. Green (PhD, University of Aberdeen) is professor of New Testament interpretation and associate dean of the Center for Advanced Theological Studies at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. Prior to moving to Fuller, he taught at Asbury Theological Seminary for ten years. He is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Theological Interpretation and has authored or edited numerous books, including the Dictionary of Scripture and Ethics.
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Michael Alexander
Michael Joseph Alexander (born 1941) is an English translator, academic and broadcaster. He held the Berry Chair of English Literature at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland until his retirement in 2003. He translated Beowulf into modern English verse.
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Pierre Abélard
Nominalist application of French theologian, philosopher, and composer Peter Abelard or Pierre Abélard of the principles of ancient Greek logic to the doctrines of the medieval Catholic Church led to charges of heresy; after his pupil Héloise, his pupil and the object of his lust affair, bore him a child, he secretly married her, whose angered family castrated him, after which he served as a monk.
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Saint Bernard of Clairvaux instrumentally condemned him.
The equally famous preeminent and perhaps the greatest of the Middle Ages during his life as a poet perhaps also ranked of his day, his ideas earned more converts and less condemnation. In all areas, brilliant, innovative, and controversial Abélard, a genius, knew and made no apologies. His -
Enheduanna
Akkadian princess, High Priestess of the Moon god Nanna, daughter of Sargon the Great. c 2285–2250 BCE
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:
While millions of Mesopotamian women lived ordinary lives, an Akkadian princess, daughter of Sargon the Great, lived a life anything but ordinary. Enheduanna (2285 to 2250 B.C.) became one of the most prominent and powerful priestesses in all of Sumer and Akkad. She holds the unique position of being the world’s first named author in all of history.
Her literary output of hymns and songs to the goddess Inanna set a high standard and example of religious psalms, hymns, prayers and poetry that was followed for the next two thousand years. The writings of Enheduanna echoed through the centuries, influencing hymns and prayers in other cultures -
Gottfried von Strassburg
Gottfried von Strassburg (died c. 1210) is the author of the Middle High German courtly romance Tristan, an adaptation of the 12th-century Tristan and Iseult legend. Gottfried's work is regarded, alongside the Nibelungenlied and Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, as one of the great narrative masterpieces of the German Middle Ages. He is probably also the composer of a small number of surviving lyrics. His work became a source of inspiration for Richard Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde (1865).
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Françoise de Graffigny
Françoise de Graffigny, née d'Issembourg Du Buisson d'Happoncourt (11 February 1695 - 12 December 1758), was a French novelist, playwright and salon hostess.
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Initially famous as the author of Lettres d'une Péruvienne, a novel published in 1747, she became the world's best-known living woman writer after the success of her sentimental comedy, Cénie, in 1750. Her reputation as a dramatist suffered when her second play at the Comédie-Française, La Fille d'Aristide, was a flop in 1758, and even her novel fell out of favor after 1830. From then until the last third of the twentieth century, she was almost forgotten, but thanks to new scholarship and the interest in women writers generated by the feminist movement, Françoise de Graffigny is now r -
Conrad Detrez
Conrad Detrez (1937-1985) was a Belgian (from 1982 on French) journalist, diplomat and novelist.
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Abandoning his theological studies at the Catholic University of Leuven (Louvain), Belgium, Detrez traveled to Brazil at age 25 and, while teaching French literature there, became involved in revolutionary politics. Deported by the Brazilian authorities, he went to Algeria and Portugal before settling in Paris in 1978. He became a French citizen in 1982.
Detrez’s first published works were translations of Brazilian authors and revolutionary essays. As his political disillusionment grew, he turned to autobiographical fiction. Ludo (1974) is a fictional account of his World War II childhood, and Les Plumes du coq (1975; “The Plumes of the Rooster”) -
Cyrano de Bergerac
Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac, French satirist, and dramatist whose works combining political satire and science-fantasy inspired a number of later writers. He has been the basis of many romantic but unhistorical legends, of which the best known is Edmond Rostand’s play Cyrano de Bergerac (1897), in which he is portrayed as a gallant and brilliant but shy and ugly lover, possessed (as in fact he was) of a remarkably large nose.
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As a young man, Cyrano joined the company of guards and was wounded at the Siege of Arras in 1640. But he gave up his military career in the following year to study under the philosopher and mathematician Pierre Gassendi. Under the influence of Gassendi’s scientific theories and libertine philosophy, Cyrano wrote his tw -
Gerald of Wales
Gerald of Wales (c. 1146 – c. 1223), also known as Gerallt Gymro in Welsh or Giraldus Cambrensis in Latin, archdeacon of Brecon, was a medieval clergyman and chronicler of his times. Born around 1146 at Manorbier Castle in Pembrokeshire, Wales, he was of mixed Norman and Welsh blood, his name being Gerald de Barri.
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Gerald's writings in good quality Latin, based on a thorough knowledge of Classical authors, reflect experiences gained on his travels as well as his great knowledge of the standard authorities and he was highly respected as a scholar in his time and afterwards. The noted scholar Edward Augustus Freeman said he was "the father of comparative philology," and in the preface to the last volume of Gerald's works in the Rolls Series, h -
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Heldris de Cornualles
AKA
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Cornuälle, Heldris de
Heldris de Cornouailles
Heldris de Cornuaille
Heldris de Cornuälle
Heldris de Cornvalle
Heldris di Cornovaglia
Heldris of Cornwall -
Catalina de Erauso
From the introduction to Lieutenant Nun by translator Michele Stepto: "She gives 1585 as the year of her birth, though records in San Sebastian indicate she was baptized in 1592. * * * Sometime between 1626 and 1630 -- that is, between the visit to Naples, which concludes her memoir, and her return to the Americas--she wrote down in manuscript or dictated to an amanuensis an account of her life. * * * A 'Relación' of Catalina's final years, published in Mexico in 1653, places her death in 1650 in Orizava, on the road to Veracruz."
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Aneirin
Aneirin [aˈnɛirɪn] or Neirin was an early historic period Brythonic poet. He is believed to have been a bard or court poet in one of the Cumbric kingdoms of the Hen Ogledd, probably that of Gododdin with its main centre at Dun Eydin (Edinburgh), in modern Scotland.
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Aneirin's patrons were the noble Urien and his son, Owain. Owain was slain at the Battle of Catraeth, in which Brythonic warriors of Gododdin fought the Angles of Deira and Bernicia. Nearly all of the Brythonic warriors were slain and their lands were absorbed into the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Aneirin wrote Y Gododdin after this battle, in remembrance of his fallen patrons and lords, in which he hints that he is likely the sole survivor. -
Hrotsvitha
On ancient Roman plays, German nun and poet Roswitha (Hrotsvitha) (circa 935-circa 1000) modeled dialogs that represent an early stage in the revival of European drama.
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With a name also spelled Hroswitha, Hrotsvit, or Hrosvit, this a 10th-century German secular canoness and dramatist, born into nobility, lived and worked in a community, the abbey of Bad Gandersheim in modern-day Lower Saxony, Germany. She attests her name as Saxon for "strong voice."
After antiquity, some critics consider her, who wrote in Latin, as the first person to compose drama in Latin-influenced western Europe.
Hrotsvit studied under Rikkardis and Gerberg, daughter of Henry the Fowler, king. Otto I the Great, emperor and brother of Gerberg, penned a history, one of p -
Ramon Llull
Ramon Llull (c. 1232 - c. 1315), T.O.S.F. (Anglicised Raymond Lully in Latin Raimundus or Raymundus Lullus or Lullius; in Castillan Raimundo Lulio, in Portuguese Raimundo Lulio) was a Majorcan writer and philosopher, logician and a Franciscan tertiary. He is credited with writing the first major work of Catalan literature. Recently surfaced manuscripts show him to have anticipated by several centuries prominent work on elections theory. He is also considered a pioneer of computation theory, especially given his influence on Gottfried Leibniz.
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Within the Franciscan Order he is honored as a martyr. He was beatified in 1857 by Pope Pius IX and his feast day was assigned to 30 June and is celebrated by the Third Order of St. Francis. -
Hildegard von Bingen
born circa 1098
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People revered Saint Hildegard von Bingen, German nun, composer, and a visionary, during her own lifetime; she set her poems to music and also wrote works on medicine and natural history.
People also knew this philosopher, Christian mystic, Benedictine abbess, and polymath as Sibyl of the Rhine. Her fellows elected her as a magistra in 1136; she founded the monasteries of Rupertsberg in 1150 and Eibingen in 1165. The Ordo Virtutum exemplifies early liturgical drama.
Her theological and botanical texts, letters, liturgical songs, and arguably the oldest morality play, well survive; she meanwhile supervised brilliant miniature Illuminations. -
Henriette Dessaulles
Henriette Dessaulles est née en 1860, dans une famille de notables politiques, à Saint-Hyacinthe. En 1881, elle y épousera Maurice Saint-Jacques, son jeune voisin qui tient une si grande place dans son journal. En 1897, au cours de la campagne électorale où il est candidat libéral, Maurice meurt des suites d'une pneumonie ; Henriette se retrouve veuve après avoir donné naissance à sept enfants. Pour gagner sa vie, elle rédigera des chroniques de graphologie dans La Patrie, Le Nationaliste, Le Devoir, puis des chroniques féminines dans Le Journal de Françoise et dans Le Canada. En 1911, dans Le Devoir, elle inaugure une chronique hebdomadaire sous le titre «Lettre de Fadette», qu'elle tiendra jusqu'à l'âge de 86 ans. C'est sous le nom de Fad
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René Char
René Char spent his childhood in Névons, the substantial family home completed at his birth, then studied as a boarder at the school of Avignon and subsequently, in 1925, a student at L'École de Commerce de Marseille, where he read Plutarch, François Villon, Racine, the German Romantics, Alfred de Vigny, Gérard de Nerval and Charles Baudelaire.
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His first book, Cloches sur le cœur was published in 1928 as a compilation of poems written between 1922 and 1926. In late November 1929, Char moved to Paris, where he met Louis Aragon, André Breton, and René Crevel, and joined the surrealists. He remained active in the surrealist movement through the early 1930s but distanced himself gradually from the mid-1930s onward. Throughout his career, Char's -
Henry of Huntingdon
Henry of Huntingdon (circa 1088 to circa 1158), was archdeacon of Huntingdon and a canon of Lincoln Cathedral. Wrote poetry, prose and a history of the English people down to the year 1154.
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Giovanni Pico della Mirandola
Count Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (Italian: [dʒoˈvanni ˈpiko della miˈrandola]; 24 February 1463 – 17 November 1494) was an Italian Renaissance philosopher. He is famed for the events of 1486, when at the age of 23, he proposed to defend 900 theses on religion, philosophy, natural philosophy and magic against all comers, for which he wrote the famous Oration on the Dignity of Man, which has been called the "Manifesto of the Renaissance", and a key text of Renaissance humanism and of what has been called the “Hermetic Reformation."
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Clément Marot
Clément Marot (23 November 1496 – 12 September 1544) was a French Renaissance poet.
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Clément Marot (vers 1496-septembre 1544) est un poète français de la Renaissance. -
René Depestre
René Depestre (born 29 August 1926 Jacmel, Haiti) is a Haitian poet and former communist activist. He is considered to be one of the most prominent figures in Haitian literature. He lived in Cuba as an exile from the Duvalier regime for many years and was a founder of the Casa de las Americas publishing house. He is best known for his poetry.
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Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson
Professor Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson CBE FRSE FSA DLitt was an English linguist and a translator who specialised in the Celtic languages. He demonstrated how the text of the Ulster Cycle of tales, written circa AD 1100, preserves an oral tradition originating some six centuries earlier and reflects Celtic Irish society of the third and fourth century AD. His Celtic Miscellany is a popular standard.
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In retirement, Jackson continued his work on place-names and Goidelic languages. However he suffered a stroke in 1984 that restricted his work.
An obituary was published in The Times on 8 March 1991 and in the journal Nomina. -
Wace
Wace (c. 1115 – c. 1183) was a Norman poet, who was born in Jersey and brought up in mainland Normandy (he tells us in the Roman de Rou that he was taken as a child to Caen), ending his career as Canon of Bayeux.
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Wace, dit aussi Guace ou Wistace était un poète normand, né à Jersey. Ses deux œuvres majeures sont le Roman de Brut et le Roman de Rou.
Sometimes referred to as Robert Wace. -
Caedmon
Cædmon is the earliest English poet whose name is known. An Anglo-Saxon who cared for the animals and was attached to the double monastery of Streonæshalch (Whitby Abbey) during the abbacy (657–680) of St. Hilda (614–680), he was originally ignorant of "the art of song" but learned to compose one night in the course of a dream, according to the 8th-century monk Bede. He later became a zealous monk and an accomplished and inspirational religious poet.
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Cædmon is one of twelve Anglo-Saxon poets identified in medieval sources, and one of only three for whom both roughly contemporary biographical information and examples of literary output have survived. His story is related in the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum ("Ecclesiastical History o