The Muses and their Afterlife in post-Classical Europe

This interdisciplinary collection of essays, presented at the Warburg Institute in 2009, considers the identity of the Muses in Antiquity and through centuries of their afterlife, tracing their religious, educational and philosophical meaning in classical Greece and their subsequent transformation and re-interpretation in a range of post-classical contexts. Individual contributors consider the invocation of the Muses in different places and at different times by those in search of inspiration, immortality and fame. The volume addresses the concept of the Muses from the perspective of philology, philosophy, art history, antiquarianism and musicology, from Antiquity to the Middle Ages and Early Modern period. It concludes with a discussion of the place of the Muses in Aby Warburg’s cultural theory