The Sight of Semiramis: Medieval and Early Modern Narratives of the Babylonian Queen

by Alison L. Beringer

Overview

Beginning with Diodorus Siculus’s first-century BCE account and extending to early modern German Meisterlieder, this book explores the plethora of narratives about the ancient Babylonian queen Semiramis. The selected texts, most from continental Europe, cover a range of genres and languages. Organized thematically around issues of visual communication — acts of seeing and being seen — this study highlights the narrative fluidity in the matière de Sémiramide, ultimately revealing a figure of excess and surplus that defies classification and categorization. In its thematic focus, this study also draws on the competitive yet complementary relationship between the visual and the verbal.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780866985420
Publisher:	ACMRS Press
Publication date:	12/15/2016
Series:	Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies , #487
Edition description:	1
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Alison L. Beringer holds the M.A. in Classics from the University of Victoria and the Ph.D. in German from Princeton University. She specializes in German literature of the late Middle Ages; her research interests include manuscript studies, the reception of antiquity, and women’s and gender studies. In addition to holding academic teaching positions, Dr. Beringer served for two years as Reader at Princeton University’s Index of Christian Art. She is currently Associate Professor of Classics and Humanities at Montclair State University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

1. Ambivalence, Confusion, and Narrative Fluidity

2. Diodorus Siculus’s Narrative of Semiramis

3. Manipulating the Sight and Site of Royal Bodies

4. Viewing the Royal Body

5. Semiramis as Viewer

6. Conclusion

Appendix
Selected Meisterlieder

Bibliography

Index