In this "magnificent book" (T. S. Eliot), Ernst Robert Curtius (1886-1956), one of the foremost literary scholars of this century, examines the continuity of European literature from Homer to Goethe, with particular emphasis on the Latin Middle Ages. In an extensive new epilogue, drawing on hitherto unpublished material, Peter Godman analyzes the intellectual and political context and character of Curtius's ideas. "This is the sort of book which takes much of a man's lifetime to produce and which can be read again and again with profit and pleasure. In effect it is an analysis of medieval Latin literature as a major stage in the transition from the Graeco-Roman classics to the modern vernacular literatures. No forbidding catalogue of periods, authors, and works, but literary criticism and literary history by a thoughtful scholar at home in classical, medieval, and modern literature, this is a powerfully presented and richly informative study of medieval standards, values, assumptions and literary conventions." ― The Virginia Quarterly Review "We have in [this work] a vast store of significant learning, and many new and important insights into the humane literary heritage and its precarious transmission." ---Francis Fergusson, The Hudson Review "A balanced introduction to Curtius studies, putting this masterpiece in context as the work of a German academic 'mandarin' whom family history, character, and intellectual training made an advocate for an elite European cultural cosmopolitanism." ― Sixteenth Century Journal Ernst Robert Curtius held the chair of romance literature and language at Bonn University from 1929 until his retirement in 1951. Colin Burrow is a fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford. He is the author of Epic Romance: Homer to Milton .