Ernst Robert Curtius held the chair of romance literature and language at Bonn University from 1929 until his retirement in 1951. Colin Burrow is a fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford. He is the author of Epic Romance: Homer to Milton.

"This is the sort of book which takes much of a man's lifetime to produce and which can be read again and again with profit and pleasure. In effect it is an analysis of medieval Latin literature as a major stage in the transition from the Graeco-Roman classics to the modern vernacular literatures. No forbidding catalogue of periods, authors, and works, but literary criticism and literary history by a thoughtful scholar at home in classical, medieval, and modern literature, this is a powerfully presented and richly informative study of medieval standards, values, assumptions and literary conventions."--The Virginia Quarterly Review "We have in [this work] a vast store of significant learning, and many new and important insights into the humane literary heritage and its precarious transmission."--Francis Fergusson, The Hudson Review "A balanced introduction to Curtius studies, putting this masterpiece in context as the work of a German academic 'mandarin' whom family history, character, and intellectual training made an advocate for an elite European cultural cosmopolitanism."--Sixteenth Century Journal "This is, I think, the finest work of literary scholarship in my time, by the great German philologist Ernst Robert Curtius. It is an extraordinary study of the continuity of European literature, from Homer and the other Greeks, on through Virgil and the great Latin writers, to a culmination in Dante, and moving beyond to a consideration of a long tradition that concludes with Goethe... It is from Curtius that I have learned--and others go on learning--what literature is, and why I myself would call it a way of life and a way of thought."--Harold Bloom, FiveBooks

• *Frontmatter, pg. i*CONTENTS, pg. v*Introduction to the 2013 edition, pg. xi*TRANSLATOR'S NOTE, pg. xxi*NOTE OF ACKNOWLEDGMENT, pg. xxii*AUTHOR'S FOREWORD TO THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION, pg. xxiii*GUIDING PRINCIPLES, pg. xxviii*1. European Literature, pg. 1*2. The Latin Middle Ages, pg. 17*3. Literature and Education, pg. 36*4. Rhetoric, pg. 62*5. Topics, pg. 79*6. The Goddess Natura, pg. 106*7. Metaphorics, pg. 128*8. Poetry and Rhetoric, pg. 145*9. Heroes and Rulers, pg. 167*10. The Ideal Landscape, pg. 183*11. Poetry and Philosophy, pg. 203*12. Poetry and Theology, pg. 214*13. The Muses, pg. 228*14. Classicism, pg. 247*15. Mannerism, pg. 273*16. The Book as Symbol, pg. 302*17. Dante, pg. 348*18. Epilogue, pg. 380*EXCURSUSES, pg. 403*APPENDIX. The Medieval Bases of Western Thought, pg. 587*BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE, pg. 599*ABBREVIATIONS, pg. 600*INDEX, pg. 603