Virgil and the Myth of Venice


Book Description

This book, which is the first comprehensive study of its subject, shows that the Roman poet Virgil played an unexpectedly significant role in the shaping of Renaissance Venetian culture. Drawing on reception theory and the sociology of literature, it argues that Virgil's poetry became a best-seller because it sometimes challenged, but more often confirmed, the specific moral, religious, and social values of the Venetian readers.




Virgil and the Myth of Venice


Book Description

This book, which is the first comprehensive study of its subject, shows that the Roman poet Virgil played an unexpectedly significant role in the shaping of Renaissance Venetian culture. Drawing on reception theory and the sociology of literature, it argues that Virgil's poetry became a best-seller because it sometimes challenged, but more often confirmed, the specific moral, religious, and social values of the Venetian readers.




English Humanism and the Reception of Virgil c. 1400-1550


Book Description

English Humanism and the Reception of Virgil c. 1400-1550 reassesses how the spread of Renaissance humanism in England impacted the reception of Virgil. It begins with the first signs of humanist influence in the fifteenth century, and ends at the height of the English Renaissance during the mid-Tudor period. This period witnessed the first extant English translations of Virgil's Aeneid, by William Caxton (1490), Gavin Douglas (1513), and the Earl of Surrey (c. 1543). It also marked the first printings of Virgil's works in England by Richard Pynson (c. 1515) and Wynkyn de Worde (1510s-1520s). Through a fine-grained analysis of surviving manuscripts and early printed editions, Matthew Day questions how and to what extent Renaissance humanism impacted readers' and translators' approaches to Virgil. Building on current scholarship in the fields of book history, classical reception, and translation studies, it draws attention to substantial continuities between the medieval and humanist reception of Virgil's works. Humanist study of Virgil, and indeed of classical poetry more generally, continued to draw many of its aims, methods, and conventions from well-established medieval traditions of learning. In emphasizing the very gradual pace of humanist development and the continuous influence of medieval scholarship, the book comes to a more qualified view of how humanism did and (just as importantly) did not affect Virgilian reading and translation. While recognizing humanist innovations and discoveries, it gives due attention to the understudied, yet far more numerous examples of consistency and traditionalism.




The Other Virgil


Book Description

The Other Virgil tells the story of how a classic like the Aeneid can say different things to different people. As a school text it was generally taught to support the values and ideals of a succession of postclassical societies, but between 1500 and 1800 a number of unusually sensitive readers responded to cues in the text that call into question what the poem appears to be supporting. This book focuses on the literary works written by these readers, to show how they used the Aeneid as a model for poems that probed and challenged the dominant values of their society, just as Virgil had done centuries before. Some of these poems are not as well known today as they should be, but others, like Milton's Paradise Lost and Shakespeare's The Tempest, are; in the latter case, the poems can be understood in new ways once their relationship to the 'other Virgil' is made clear.




Virgil


Book Description

VIRGIL “A truly useful introduction to Vergil and his poetry. Smith combines up-to-date information on the issues with an intelligent and well-written assessment. Highly recommended.” Karl Galinsky, University of Texas at Austin “For the newcomer to Virgil, this book will be a welcome introduction to the poet’s works and their reception by critics, artists, and scholars through the centuries.” Peter E. Knox, University of Colorado, Boulder Incorporating the most up-to-date classical scholarship, Virgilian scholar R. Alden Smith presents a comprehensive introduction to Virgil’s literary works and narrative technique. In addition to exploring the historical milieu, this book considers the reception of Virgil’s works, citing examples from painting, sculpture, and drama. After analyzing Virgil’s three major works – the Eclogues, Georgics, and the great national epic of Rome, the Aeneid – Smith addresses other key topics, including the manuscript tradition and various problems associated with establishment of the text. Virgil’s legacy, including his influence on subsequent Latin poetry and later literary figures (e.g., Dante, Camões, Milton) is also a feature of this study. Combining scholarly rigor and an accessible writing style, Smith offers an insightful introduction to Virgil and the world in which he lived.




Virgil in the Renaissance


Book Description

The disciplines of classical scholarship were established in their modern form between 1300 and 1600, and Virgil was a test case for many of them. This book is concerned with what became of Virgil in this period, how he was understood, and how his poems were recycled. What did readers assume about Virgil in the long decades between Dante and Sidney, Petrarch and Spenser, Boccaccio and Ariosto? Which commentators had the most influence? What story, if any, was Virgil's Eclogues supposed to tell? What was the status of his Georgics? Which parts of his epic attracted the most imitators? Building on specialized scholarship of the last hundred years, this book provides a panoramic synthesis of what scholars and poets from across Europe believed they could know about Virgil's life and poetry.




The Reception of Vergil in Renaissance Rome


Book Description

Roman humanists appropriated Vergilian themes and language to articulate a vision for Rome in the early Cinquecento. This particular brand of Vergilianism became the language of the discourse of papal Rome, demonstrating Vergilian interpretation and application varied based on locale.




The Virgilian Tradition


Book Description

The essays in this collection approach the reception of the Roman poet Virgil in early modern Europe from the perspective of two areas at the center of current scholarly work in the humanities: book history and the history of reading. The first group of essays uses Virgil's place in post-classical culture to raise questions of broad scholarly interest: How, exactly, does modern reception theory challenge traditional notions of literary practice and value? How do the marginal comments of early readers provide insight into their character and mind? How does rhetoric help shape literary criticism? The second group of essays begins from the premise that the material form in which early modern readers encountered this most important of Latin poets played a key role in how they understood what they read. Thus title pages and illustrations help shape interpretation, with the results of that interpretation in turn becoming the comments that early modern readers regularly entered into the margins of their books. The volume concludes with four more specialized studies that show how these larger issues play out in specific neo-Latin works of the early modern period.




The Other Virgil


Book Description

The story of how the Aeneid has been approached by various postclassical authors - including Shakespeare and Milton - not as an endorsement of the ideals of their societies, but as a model for poems that probed and challenged dominant values, just as Virgil himself had done centuries before.




The Protean Virgil


Book Description

The Protean Virgil argues that when we try to understand how and why different readers have responded differently to the same text over time, we should take into account the physical form in which they read the text as well as the text itself. Using Virgil's poetry as a case study in book history, the volume shows that a succession of material forms - manuscript, printed book, illustrated edition, and computer file - undermines the drive toward textual and interpretive stability. This stability is the traditional goal of classical scholarship, which seeks to recover what Virgil wrote and how he intended it to be understood. The manuscript form served to embed Virgil's poetry into Christian culture, which attempted to anchor the content into a compatible theological truth. Readers of early printed material proceeded differently, breaking Virgil's text into memorable moral and stylistic fragments, and collecting those fragments into commonplace books. Furthermore, early illustrated editions present a progression of re-envisionings in which Virgil's poetry was situated within a succession of receiving cultures. In each case, however, the material form helped to generate a method of reading Virgil which worked with this form but which failed to survive the transition to a new union of the textual and the physical. This form-induced instability reaches its climax with computerization, which allows the reader new power to edit the text and to challenge the traditional association of Virgil's poetry with elite culture.