The Comparative Poetics of Homeric Literary Imitation from Antiquity to Renaissance France

Aphrodite's famous ribbon known as the cestus, the irresistible love charm that she loaned to Hera in the Iliad, was, thanks to a fruitful early misreading, transformed by ancient, medieval, and Renaissance authors into a symbol of honorable feminine chastity. This book traces the history of this curious development from Homer to the end of the sixteenth century in France.