The Padmavat (1540 CE) by the Indian Sufi poet Malik Muhammad Jayasi is a classic of pre-modern Indian literature. It relates how the Rajput king Ratansen of Chitor finds and marries the beautiful princess Padmavati, and how the sultan Alauddin Khilji, on hearing of her beauty, besieges Chitor in a fruitless attempt to capture her.

'The Ruby in the Dust' presents a reading of Padmavat that challenges existing interpretations of Jayasi’s work and describes how its semantic polyphony reflects t...

The epigram is certainly one of the most intriguing, while at the same time most elusive, genres of Neo-Latin literature. From the end of the fifteenth century, almost every humanist writer who regarded himself a true ‘poeta’ had composed a respectable number of epigrams. Given our sense of poetical aesthetics, be it idealistic, post-idealistic, modern or post-modern, the epigrammatic genre is difficult to understand. Because of its close ties with the historical and social context, it does...