Mythology/Religion

Language/Literature, Mythology/Religion

Uncanny Intruders

My main project at CHS this semester, provisionally entitled Uncanny Intruders, seeks to understand Greek literature’s fascination with what Sarah Johnston has called the “returning dead,” from the Homeric poems to Heliodorus’ Ethiopian Story. It demonstrates how an engagement with anthropological approaches to the history and phenomenology of ancient religious experience can deepen and complicate readings of literary texts. In addition, I have also been working on a collaborative project… Read more

Language/Literature, Mythology/Religion

The Poetics of Distress, the Rape of the Heavenly Maiden, and the Most Ancient Sleeping Beauty: Oralistic, Linguistic, and Comparative Perspectives on the (Pre-)Historical Development of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter

Often compared with West Asian and Egyptian texts, the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (hereafter Hymn) and the other variants of the myth of Demeter and Persephone-Kore have a number of onomastic, phraseological, and thematic parallels in texts composed in other Indo-European languages. By means of an oralistic, linguistic, and comparative approach, my research aims to, firstly, reconstruct the common background of the Hymn and its Indo-European counterparts on the strength… Read more

Art/Archaeology, Language/Literature, Mythology/Religion

Euripides’ Athens: Art, Cult, and Leadership

Abstract This is a book-length project that investigates the political implications of Euripides’ dialogue with cult, iconography and architecture, mainly but not exclusively Athenian. In the first part of this report (‘Art and Politics in Euripides’ Plays’) I offer an overview of my findings before starting my fellowship at the… Read more

Language/Literature, Mythology/Religion

The Poetics of Female Hiketeia: Cult and Character in Euripides

Abstract Setting out to study the significance of Euripidean representations of cultic activities, I have used Andromache as a case study, in order to decode the ways female hiketeia is used in Euripides as a vehicle to engage with questions of cult, individual and collective characterization, gender and class disparities,… Read more

Language/Literature, Mythology/Religion

Epics and Ritual: Reconsidering Homeric Performance in Ancient Greece

Citation with persistent identifier: Brouillet, Manon. “Epics and Ritual: Reconsidering Homeric Performance in Ancient Greece.” CHS Research Bulletin 7 (2019). http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hlnc.essay:BrouilletM.Epics_and_Ritual.2019 Abstract My project on Homeric epics and ritual seeks to explore the link between the massive importance of Homeric epics in Greek polytheism, as stated by Herodotus himself, and their performance during religious… Read more