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Classics papers

Pofolia’s corpus holds 95 papers from Classics (2012–2026), each with a short summary. Below, the 20 most-cited, then the most recently added.

At a glance

  • Most cited: Rabelais and his world (2020, 3,437 citations).
  • The 20 papers listed have 10,728 citations between them.
  • 1 of the 3 with a known journal quartile appeared in a Q1 journal.
  • 1 have a free full text (open access).
  • Most frequent journals: Harvard University Press eBooks, Princeton University Press eBooks, Cambridge University Press eBooks.
  • Published between 2012 and 2025.

Most cited

Ranked by citation count. Because citations accumulate over time, this list naturally leans towards work published a few years ago; for where the field is now, see “recently added”. How to read the signals

  • Rabelais and his world

    2020 · FWCI 691.58 · 3,437 citations

    Rabelais's work integrates themes of "uncrowning" and "carnivalesque" imagery, drawing from both living popular traditions and ancient scholarly rituals like the Saturnalia.

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  • Information, Natural Law, and the Self-Assembly of Rhythmic Movement

    2015 · FWCI 61.95 · 1,294 citations

    This 1987 work successfully explains wrist-pendulum oscillations using physical representations, introducing new physics-based concepts to biology.

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  • Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe

    2017 · FWCI 52.59 · 822 citations

    This study examines the broad sweep of pre-industrial Europe's popular culture from 1500-1800, analyzing how the attitudes and values of ordinary people shaped and were shaped by societal conditions.

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  • Alliance Formation in Civil Wars

    Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2012 · FWCI 27.12 · 456 citations

    Contrary to common assumptions, the primary driver of alliance formation and disintegration in civil wars is not shared identity, but rather the relative power distribution between and within warring groups.

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  • The Faiss Library

    IEEE Transactions on Big Data · 2025 · Q1 · SJR 1.00 · FWCI 8478.07 · 421 citations

    Faiss is a new toolkit for efficient vector similarity search, designed to handle the massive scale of embeddings required by rapidly growing AI applications.

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  • King Alfred's West-Saxon Version of Gregory's Pastoral Care

    2023 · FWCI 43.94 · 400 citations · Open access

    King Alfred's West-Saxon Version of Gregory's Pastoral Care, a key Anglo-Saxon text, provides invaluable data for understanding ninth-century West-Saxon grammar.

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  • The Implications of Literacy

    Princeton University Press eBooks · 2021 · FWCI 7.72 · 357 citations

    Medieval and early modern literacy didn't replace oral traditions but created a new interdependence, with written texts acting as a crucial reference system even when not physically present.

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  • The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages

    Oxford University Press eBooks · 2013 · FWCI 19.82 · 348 citations

    This book proposes a new framework for understanding medieval aesthetic values, grounding them in sensory and emotional experiences rather than solely symbolism or theology.

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  • Categories of Medieval Culture

    2025 · FWCI 9.32 · 345 citations

    This book reconstructs medieval culture by analyzing how people of the era perceived their world, as reflected in their vernacular and Latin literature.

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  • The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints

    The European Legacy · 2014 · Q2 · 338 citations

    The Golden Legend, a collection of saints' lives, was the second most widely read book in the late Middle Ages, surpassed only by the Bible.

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  • Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network

    Nineteenth Century Contexts · 2016 · Q2 · 327 citations

    This book proposes an "invigorating inversion" of formalism, arguing that formalist analysis, rather than being a fixed or static concept, is dynamic and can be understood through four interconnected modes: whole, rhythm, hierarchy, and network.

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  • Time and Its Adversaries in the Seleucid Empire

    Harvard University Press eBooks · 2018 · FWCI 62.95 · 323 citations

    This work explores how the Seleucid Empire's imposed formal temporal structures, like the Seleucid Era year count, clashed with and were resisted by diverse indigenous temporalities in the Hellenistic East.

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  • The Byzantine Republic

    Harvard University Press eBooks · 2015 · FWCI 62.26 · 266 citations

    This work argues that the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire was fundamentally a republic, not a Christian theocracy, with power exercised by and for its Greek-speaking citizens who identified as Roman.

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  • Sons of Hellenism, fathers of the church: Emperor Julian, Gregory of Nazianzus, and the vision of Rome

    Choice Reviews Online · 2012 · 247 citations

    This paper analyzes the complex intellectual and political rivalry between Emperor Julian and Gregory of Nazianzus, two prominent figures of the 4th-century Roman Empire.

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  • The Golden Legend

    Princeton University Press eBooks · 2012 · FWCI 41.37 · 246 citations

    The Golden Legend, a compilation of saints' lives compiled around 1260 by Jacobus de Voragine, was one of the most widely read books in the late Middle Ages.

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  • Medieval English Literature

    2016 · FWCI 5.23 · 224 citations

    This abstract outlines the structure and content of a collection of essays on Medieval English Literature, covering topics from romance and Chaucer to religious texts.

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  • The Land of the Elephant Kings

    Harvard University Press eBooks · 2014 · FWCI 7.73 · 222 citations

    This work examines how the Seleucid Empire, built on Alexander the Great's Asian conquests, unified diverse territories despite lacking ancestral ties to them.

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  • History, Frankish Identity and the Framing of Western Ethnicity, 550–850

    Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2015 · FWCI 10.10 · 222 citations

    This study argues that early medieval Frankish identity was pivotal in shaping a distinct Western concept of ethnicity, shifting from viewing ethnicity as the 'Other' to a perception of chosen Christian peoples.

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  • Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance

    Harvard University Press eBooks · 2014 · FWCI 33.79 · 221 citations

    Renaissance poets and philologists, rather than scientists, were key in reviving Lucretius's atomism theory.

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  • Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade

    Princeton University Press eBooks · 2014 · FWCI 21.61 · 212 citations

    This seminal 1925 work argues that the destruction of antiquity's civilization was caused not by Germanic invasions, but by the Arab conquest of Mediterranean trade routes in the 7th century.

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Recently added

Journals in this field

The journals that publish most of this field’s papers. Quartile (Q1–Q4), SJR and h-index are from SCImago Journal Rank; “in this field” is how many of the journal’s pooled papers belong here. What is a Q1 journal? · What is the h-index?

JournalQuartileSJRh-indexIn this fieldSummaries
ReligionsQ1—48215
Journal of the European Economic AssociationQ17.0013013

Every journal in Classics (Q1–Q4) →

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