Myths of the Golden Age in European Culture

This book offers a fresh look at Hesiod’s concept of a ’Golden Age’. It analyses the ways in which classical philosophers explored it and traces the many creative interactions with it in literature from the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Age of Goethe as well as Chinese literature.

Stephen G. Nichols is the James M. Beall Professor Emeritus and Academy Professor of French and Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, an Honorary Senior Fellow of the School of Criticism and Theory (which he directed from 1996-2001). He received an honorary Docteur dès Lettres from the University of Geneva, is an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres (France) and was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Prize in 2008, 2015, and 2023. A Yale University Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, he has written or edited some 27 books on the Middle Ages, including Romanesque Signs: Early Medieval Narrative and Iconography, which received MLA’s Lowell Prize for an outstanding book, and From Parchment to Cyberspace: Medieval Literature in the Digital Age. Nichols co-directs JHU’s Digital Library of Medieval Manuscripts and co-founded the journal Digital Philology.

Claudia Olk is chair of English and Director of the Shakespeare Library at Ludwig- Maximilians-Universität München. Until 2019 she was chair of Comparative Literature at the Peter Szondi Institute of the Freie Universität Berlin and Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and the Humanities. Her main fields of research are Medieval and Renaissance Literature, Shakespeare Studies as well as Modernism. She is a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities and served as President of the German Shakespeare Society from 2014-2023. Her publications include: Travel and Narration: the development of fiction in late medieval and renaissance travel narratives (1999), Virginia Woolf’s Aesthetics of Vision (2014), and Shakespeare and Beckett: Restless Echoes (2023). Her edition of one of Virginia Woolf’s hitherto unpublished manuscripts was published in 2013 by the British Library.