Examines the impact of an ancient and prestigious text on medieval culture.

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.

Brings together studies by scholars from a range of academic disciplines to assess the central position of Virgil in the intellectual, artistic, and political lives of the Renaissance. This collection of essays presents a variety of case studies of Virgils impact on different branches of Renaissance culture, covering the crucial areas of education and court culture, the visual arts, music history, philosophy, and Neo-Latin and vernacular literature. It brings together established scholars and younger researchers from a range of different academic disciplines. The studies included here will be of particular interest to students of Renaissance social, intellectual, and literary history, to art historians, and to those working on the reception of classical literature; some offer new perspectives on well-known material, while others investigate examples of Renaissance engagement with the Virgilian corpus which have received little or no previous attention. Building on recent scholarship on the Virgilian tradition, the collection opens up new avenues for research on the reception of both Virgil and other classical authors, and addresses questions of fundamental importance to historians of this period not least the perennial debate over the nature and definition of the Renaissance itself.

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 Medieval Classic considers how ancient and medieval commentaries on the Aeneid by Servius, Fulgentius, Bernard Silvestris, and others can give us new insights into four twelfth-century Latin epics -- the Ylias by Joseph of Exeter, the Alexandreis by Walter of Châtillon, the Anticlaudianus by Alan of Lille, and the Architrenius by John of Hauville. Justin Haynes argues that the most profound connections between medieval epic and the Aeneid have been overlooked because ancient and medieval interpretations, as preserved by the commentary tradition, were often radically different from modern ones. By explaining how to interpret the Aeneid, these commentaries directly influenced the way in which medieval authors were inspired by the poem. At the same time, these commentaries allow us a greater awareness of the generic expectations held by medieval readers. Because two of the medieval epics considered here are allegorical narratives, this book offers new perspectives on the importance of commentaries in the development of allegorical literature. Thus, The Medieval Classic contributes to our understanding of ancient and medieval perceptions of the Aeneid while exploring the importance of commentaries in shaping poetic composition, imitation, and the history of allegorical literature.

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.

Virgil became a school author in his own lifetime and the centre of the Western canon for the next 1800 years, exerting a major influence on European literature, art, and politics. This Companion is designed as an indispensable guide for anyone seeking a fuller understanding of an author critical to so many disciplines. It consists of essays by seventeen scholars from Britain, the USA, Ireland and Italy which offer a range of different perspectives both traditional and innovative on Virgil's works, and a renewed sense of why Virgil matters today. The Companion is divided into four main sections, focussing on reception, genre, context, and form. This ground-breaking book not only provides a wealth of material for an informed reading but also offers sophisticated insights which point to the shape of Virgilian scholarship and criticism to come.

The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (OHCREL) is designed to offer a comprehensive investigation of the numerous and diverse ways in which literary texts of the classical world have stimulated responses and refashioning by English writers. Covering the full range of English literature from the early Middle Ages to the present day, OHCREL both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge new research, employing an international team of expert contributors for each of the five volumes. OHCREL endeavours to interrogate, rather than inertly reiterate, conventional assumptions about literary 'periods', the processes of canon-formation, and the relations between literary and non-literary discourse. It conceives of 'reception' as a complex process of dialogic exchange and, rather than offering large cultural generalizations, it engages in close critical analysis of literary texts. It explores in detail the ways in which English writers' engagement with classical literature casts as much light on the classical originals as it does on the English writers' own cultural context. This first volume, and fourth to appear in the series, covers the years c.800-1558, and surveys the reception and transformation of classical literary culture in England from the Anglo-Saxon period up to the Henrician era. Chapters on the classics in the medieval curriculum, the trivium and quadrivium, medieval libraries, and medieval mythography provide context for medieval reception. The reception of specific classical authors and traditions is represented in chapters on Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Statius, the matter of Troy, Boethius, moral philosophy, historiography, biblical epics, English learning in the twelfth century, and the role of antiquity in medieval alliterative poetry. The medieval section includes coverage of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, while the part of the volume dedicated to the later period explores early English humanism, humanist education, and libraries in the Henrician era, and includes chapters that focus on the classicism of Skelton, Douglas, Wyatt, and Surrey.

An examination of female same-sex desire in Chaucer and medieval romance.