Twentieth-century critics have opposed the supposed objectivity of the essay to the letter and diary as private, self-expressive, and autobiographical genres. But this was a modern development. From Michel de Montaigne to the early nineteenth century, the essay, the letter, and the diary were more alike and far more closely aligned than they later became, particularly with regard to representations of the self and notions of publicity. For instance, they were all considered forms of address, and means of presenting one’s intellectual physiognomy to others that were likely to be read aloud, shared, and discussed. This chapter therefore explores now-forgotten family resemblances among these genres both in form and function and concludes by showing where they were fused or embedded in one another.

Relatively few works of ancient literature survive intact. Many more are known only as fragments or through the testimony of other authors. How should literary history acknowledge the fact and the consequences of such extensive loss? This chapter reviews the difficulties in identifying and presenting the evidence for lost works, explores what (besides their hypothetical reconstruction) can be learned from their remains, and considers how accommodation of the lost and the fragmentary challenges historians of literature to rethink the objectives and the methods of their enterprise.

This essay seeks in Tracy an account of dialogue as the first hope of post-war forgiveness and reconciliation, for the author’s own troubled setting of post-civil war Croatia. Despite Tracy not having written on reconciliation after conflict, ‘a Tracyean route to the hope of dialogue’ takes shape here via Tracyean emphases on ‘history’, ‘tragedy’, and ‘fragments’. Dialogue becomes theological here not solely on account of religious contexts widely present in Croatia, but also, after Tracy, whenever dialogue approaches its proper goals and reach. In ‘a practical-historical context of despair and violence’, recent works by Tracy helps by: (1) highlighting the value of a tragic sensibility within culture and Christianity; and (2) proposing hope around strong fragments (or ‘frag-events’). In an innovative application of Tracy, some of the most powerful Croatian fragments are those ordinary inhabitants whose lives are witness to the country’s collective failures in addressing ongoing experiences of extraordinary injustice and suffering. It is to them that dialogue must be exposed if Croatian society is to open itself towards a divine Infinity of hope and forgiveness.

This article discusses David Tracy’s implicit and explicit reflection on the church as a community of Christian praxis. The church is both a social and a theological reality, just like its theological partner-reality ‘the world’. This means that no concrete expression of the Christian church may pronounce itself wholly or uniquely adequate to its theological field; neither can any boundary between ‘church’ and ‘world’ be rendered theologically determinate or fundamental. So Tracy’s thinking focuses on the centre of the church, not on its boundaries. As gift and sacrament, the church participates in God’s grace as disclosed in God’s self-manifestation in Jesus Christ. In bearing witness to this event, the church’s critical and self-critical praxis of love is borne upon mystical-prophetic discourses and dialogues with otherness without and within. Ecclesiology, therefore, emerges only in fragments and not as a closed system. Tracy’s ecclesiology is everywhere a function of an account of God and reality. A Christian church that learns a Tracyean route to naming God aspires actively, contemplatively, and fragmentarily to realise itself in answering fashion as an ‘institution of love’.

David Tracy’s work invites readers generously into ever-widening conversations while Tracy himself pursues a precise theological ‘pointilism’ calling for lengthy rumination. Tracy’s concept of the ‘classic’– cultural, religious, theological– is endlessly fruitful for theology amid plural and ambiguous history. Tracy’s work may be viewed as an attempt at ‘making the future of theology now’, adumbrating theological possibility in a complicated and complicating present. Tracy’s major early works– Blessed Rage for Order (1975) and The Analogical Imagination (1981)– quite radically reconceived theology for greater present-day self-awareness, yet equally Tracy’s concept of analogical imagination calls to mind the ‘third way’ between cataphasis and apophasis that Dionysius the Areopagite pretended to have written as his Symbolic Theology. Tracy’s recent essay collections, Fragments and Filaments, reprise the theological experience of reading Tracy. As fragments and filaments (‘ever unreeling … ever tirelessly speeding’– Walt Whitman), these mutually resonating essays quicken into theological events for readers who learn to read well, with Tracy, to ‘make the future of theology now’.

This chapter will focus on patterns repetition in speech fragments from Cato the Elder to C. Gracchus, as well as the speeches quoted in the Rhetorica ad Herennium, with a view to understanding their composition and intended effects. Repetition provides a systematic framework for many of the traditional rhetorical figures, such as anaphora, alliteration, homoeoteleuton, antithesis and polyptoton (see D. Fehling, Die Wiederholungsfiguren und ihr Gebrauch bei den Griechen vor Gorgias, Berlin 1969; cf. J. Wills, Repetition in Latin Poetry, Oxford 1996). Using repetition as a lens allows analysis not only of longer extracts but also of very short fragments. These patterns will be used to test the thesis that Roman oratory continued to respond to the ancient Latin form of the carmen even while being influenced by Greek rhetorical ideas (cf. on this point E. Sciarrino, Cato the Censor and the Beginnings of Latin Prose, Columbus 2011). The transmission of the fragments under consideration is itself heavily influenced by the rhetorical and grammatical tradition, and my discussion will accordingly take account of the screening effects which this transmission has on the evidence.

The literary beginnings of the Italian vernacular are traditionally identified at the imperial court of Frederick II in Sicily, where a remarkable group of poets wrote love lyrics and innovated a new form – the sonnet – that would have a lasting impact on European verse. At seigneurial courts across the north of the peninsula, by contrast, the prevalent literary vernacular was Occitan. Recent archival discoveries, such as the Ravenna fragment, have helped to provide a glimpse of the earliest literary production in the north. Even if these fragments witness a beginning that did not develop into a literary tradition, they nonetheless represent valuable evidence of the complexity and texture of the earliest literary expressions in the Italian vernacular. This essay examines some of these fragments or, adopting Armando Petrucci’s term, ‘traces’, and highlights the sharp contrast in material terms that is found in the later Tuscan ‘songbooks’ or canzonieri, which witness almost all of the surviving lyric poetry of the Sicilian School. The essay concludes by looking at how Dante, after the comprehensive analysis of vernacular literature in the De vulgari eloquentia, writes a poem that overtly signals itself as a new vernacular beginning.

An exploration of the cultural mechanism of quotation in modernity and antiquity. An overview of the process of ancient poetic fragmentation (how fragments of poetry are made) and a brief history of scholarly editions and collections of Latin poetic fragments. An overview of techniques used by Cicero to quote poetry, and the impact of his methods upon the modern understanding of fragmentary Latin poetry.

Alison Milbank’s chapter on Gothic prose, ranging from Ann Radcliffe in the late eighteenth century to contemporary Gothic, shows how often language in these works verges on the inexpressible, reminding us that our rational understanding of human experience may only be partial. Language that superanimates the natural world, the frequent use of em dashes that gesture towards the unsaid, even the unsayable, grotesque and arabesque styles, and equivocal, combinatory techniques are all mobilised to create a set of effects that test the limits of our capacity for understanding.

This chapter addresses the extensive fragment attributed to Aeschylus’ Carians/Europa, in which the speaker Europa describes her rape by Zeus, the births of her three children, and her fear for the safety of her son Sarpedon; this speech allows the audience ‘to contemplate the sufferings of Europa over a woman’s full lifecycle, culminating in her role as aged mother awaiting her only surviving son’s return’. Considering issues of lexicon and dramatic technique, the chapter supports a date for the play in the 420s, noting with sympathy Martin West’s argument this play’s author was Aeschylus’ son Euphorion.

Usually marking moments of elevated emotion, tragic song is used to powerful effect in the characterisation of both male and female (non-choral) characters, but is more strongly associated with the latter, in part owing to the associations of ritual lament as a women’s genre. This chapter analyses a notable instance of female song in Euripides, the titular figure’s monody in Hypsipyle. This character’s song came to be viewed as so representative of the playwright’s New Musical tendencies that she was parodied in Aristophanes’ Frogs as ‘the Muse of Euripides’. A detailed reading of both the monody itself and Hypsipyle’s Aristophanic reception blends the study of mousikē, aesthetics, synaesthesia, and cult to show how Euripides’ singing heroine absorbs the audience into her desire for a form of music marked as Asian, Orphic, and citharodic, and which forges a continuous chain between the musical culture of Lemnos and Euripides’ contemporary Athens. In this interpretation, Hypsipyle’s song showcases not just the playwright’s skill in the creation of a virtuosic female voice, but also his use of female song to create a link to the political realities of the world of the audience.

The influence of the extant plays has been so immense and far-reaching that it is easy to forget that other tragic versions of these characters existed. This is true above all in the case of Euripides’ Medea, whose terrible, tortured act of infanticide is to many modern readers and audiences the single defining aspect of her tragic characterisation. The final chapter destabilises this preconception by drawing together evidence for the full range of tragic Medeas, including a play in which she is not guilty of the act that has come to define her, the killing of her own children. Wright recovers a more accurate picture of Medea on the tragic stage, and suggests that what ‘made Medea Medea’ for the ancient audiences was not her infanticide, but rather the sheer range and malleability of stories in which she featured. This survey offers an important corrective to widespread conceptions of this iconic figure, and powerfully demonstrates how the legacy of a single surviving version has distorted our understanding of the kinds of female characters with which ancient tragic audiences would have been familiar.

This chapter introduces the book by examining the place of fragments within tragic scholarship as well as scholarly trends in the tragic representation of women, and by surveying the contents of the different chapters and suggesting pathways for future work.

This chapter analyses the particularly complex representation of responsibility and selfhood present in the speech of Pasiphae in Euripides’ Cretans, in which the queen defends her act of falling in love with the bull. The chapter shows how Pasiphae is able to dissociate herself completely from her past actions by appealing to divine intervention, the role of her husband Minos, and an understanding of human morality and motivation that is rooted in hedonistic principles. Pasiphae’s defence thus relies on a concept of the fragmentation of the self that reveals her as one of Euripides’ most philosophically sophisticated female speakers.