Ebook: Roman and European Mythologies

Compiled by Yves Bonnefoy. Translated under the direction of Wendy Doniger by Gerald Honigsblum,
Danielle Beauvais, Teresa Lavender Fagan, Dorothy Figuiera, Barry Friedman, Louise Guiney, John Leavitt,
Louise Root, Bruce Sullivan, and David White.

That work was originally published as "Dictionnaire des mythologies et des religions des sociétés traditionnelles et du monde antique", sous la direction de Yves Bonnefoy, publié avec le concours du Centre National des Lettres, 1981, Flammarion, Paris.

This volume begins with Roman myths and traces their influence in early Christian and later European literature. Ninety-five entries by leading scholars cover subjects such as sacrificial cults and rites in pre-Roman Italy, Roman religion and its origins, the mythologies of paganism, the survival of the ancient gods in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, gypsy myths and rituals, romanticism and myth in Blake, Nerval, and Balzac, and myth in twentieth-century English literature.

Mythologies offers illuminating examples of the workings of myth in the structure of societies past and present — how we create, use, and are guided by systems of myth to answer fundamental questions about ourselves and our world.