Una's Lectures – serie

Elizabethan foreign policy was very much the policy of Queen Elizabeth l herself. It was not foreplanned, envisaged whole in advance. It was built up out of her responses to questions and problems posed by her relations with neighboring and, in the case of France and Spain, far more powerful countries. The responses, inspired by consistent instincts and opinions concerning her own country's true interests, grew into a coherent policy.

From the Poetry of Sumer: Creation, Glorification, Adoration by Samuel Noah Kramer offers modern readers a rare window into the world’s earliest recorded literature. Kramer, one of the foremost authorities on Sumerian civilization, surveys a century of philological and archaeological work that has recovered thousands of cuneiform tablets from sites such as Nippur, Ur, and Kish. These texts—myths, hymns, laments, disputations, and proverbs—preserve a literary culture nearly four millennia old. The volume moves from the painstaking story of how this forgotten corpus was reconstructed to close readings of works that illuminate Sumerian ideas of creation, kingship, and divine femininity.Structured in three thematic parts, the book examines Sumerian cosmogony, highlighting how ancient poets envisioned the separation of heaven and earth and the creation of humankind. Kramer then turns to royal hymns, showing how they model the “perfect man” through exaltation of kings such as Shulgi. Finally, he foregrounds the adoration of goddesses like Inanna, underscoring Sumer’s distinctive portrayal of liberated female divinity. Richly documented and accessible, this study bridges philology, literary history, and comparative religion, making the oldest poetry in human history newly legible for scholars of the ancient Near East, biblical studies, anthropology, and the history of ideas.This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1979.

The Resources of Kind: Genre-Theory in the Renaissance, edited by Barbara K. Lewalski, presents the four Una’s Lectures delivered at Berkeley in 1972 by Rosalie Littell Colie, whose sudden death prevented their further expansion into the major study she had planned. Even in this form, the essays offer a landmark contribution to Renaissance literary history and critical theory. With Colie’s characteristic erudition and elegance, they emphasize the richness and flexibility of Renaissance genre, challenging the modern prejudice that genre constrains originality. Instead, she shows how genres act as frames of communication and metaphors for human understanding, shaping both literature and the apprehension of reality itself.Colie identifies a central tension in Renaissance genre theory between the strict differentiation of kinds and the conception of literature as a totalizing paideia that could incorporate all knowledge. This tension opened the way for the elevation of “minor” or unconventional forms—emblems, epigrams, prose fiction, philosophical poems, dialogues—and for the invention of new forms like the essay, the picaresque novel, and the historical epic. Her lectures trace the assimilation of small forms into larger works and demonstrate how masterpieces such as Paradise Lost and King Lear achieve greatness through their encyclopedic blending of multiple genres, presenting the full range of human experience. Though unfinished, these lectures encapsulate Colie’s wide-ranging scholarship and her enduring influence, offering both new insights into Renaissance genre and a model of intellectual speculation that continues to shape the field.This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1973.

From the Poetry of Sumer: Creation, Glorification, Adoration by Samuel Noah Kramer offers modern readers a rare window into the world’s earliest recorded literature. Kramer, one of the foremost authorities on Sumerian civilization, surveys a century of philological and archaeological work that has recovered thousands of cuneiform tablets from sites such as Nippur, Ur, and Kish. These texts—myths, hymns, laments, disputations, and proverbs—preserve a literary culture nearly four millennia old. The volume moves from the painstaking story of how this forgotten corpus was reconstructed to close readings of works that illuminate Sumerian ideas of creation, kingship, and divine femininity.Structured in three thematic parts, the book examines Sumerian cosmogony, highlighting how ancient poets envisioned the separation of heaven and earth and the creation of humankind. Kramer then turns to royal hymns, showing how they model the “perfect man” through exaltation of kings such as Shulgi. Finally, he foregrounds the adoration of goddesses like Inanna, underscoring Sumer’s distinctive portrayal of liberated female divinity. Richly documented and accessible, this study bridges philology, literary history, and comparative religion, making the oldest poetry in human history newly legible for scholars of the ancient Near East, biblical studies, anthropology, and the history of ideas.This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1979.