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Author: Marc Bizer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2011-09
Total Pages: 258
ISBN-13: 019973156X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This text disputes the notion that humanists in 16th-century France were ivory-tower academics detached from the world. Through their interpretations of Homer, they participated in national debates about sovereignty and contributed to the development of a French national consciousness.
Author: Marc Bizer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2011-09-01
Total Pages: 272
ISBN-13: 0190453478
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →At a time when the French monarchy traced its origins back to ancient Troy, Homeric epic was fated to play a significant political role. Homer came to Renaissance France packaged with an ancient interpretive tradition that made him an authority on all matters but also distinctly separate from Virgil and the Aeneid, rival Italy's foundational myth. Thus, once French humanists learned to read Homer in Greek, they quickly began putting him in the service of their king in order to teach him prudence and amplify his authority. Homer and the Politics of Authority in Renaissance France provides a stimulating perspective on how Homeric authority went from being used by humanists in the role of royal counselors to being exploited by both monarchical and anti-monarchical forces in the service of ideologies, most especially in the Wars of Religion (1562-1598). In turn, French writers of the period transitioned from being monarchical advisors to stirring crowds as actors on the larger political stage. In this study, Marc Bizer not only analyzes a number of works by key authors and humanists-including Michel de Montaigne, Joachim du Bellay, Guillaume Budé, and Jean Dorat, among others- but also examines their poetry, art, pamphlets, and plays. Although there have been several studies of the Homeric legacy in western literature and even in early modern French literature, none has analyzed the political role that Homer played in sixteenth-century France for this circle of important writers. The captivating results of this approach to the post-classical usage of Homer will appeal not only to historians and literary scholars, but also to political scientists, classicists, and art historians.
Author: Jeff Persels
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2017-11-01
Total Pages: 442
ISBN-13: 9004351515
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Twenty original perspectives on such authors as Marguerite de Navarre, Rabelais, Montaigne, Marot, Labé, and Hélisenne de Crenne, as well as on less familiar works of religious polemics, emblems, cartography, geomancy, bibliophilism, and ichthyology.
Author: Frederic Clark
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2020-09-30
Total Pages: 320
ISBN-13: 0190492317
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In The History of the Destruction of Troy, Dares the Phrygian boldly claimed himself as eyewitness to the Trojan War, challenging the accounts of two of the ancient world's most canonical poets, Homer and Virgil. For over a milennium, Dares' work was circulated as the first pagan history. It promised facts and only facts about what really happened at Troy--precise casualty figures, no mentions of mythical phenomena, and a claim that Troy fell when Aeneas and other Trojans betrayed their city and opened gates to the Greeks. But for all its intrigue, the work was as sensational as it was fake. From the late antique encyclopedist Isidore of Seville to Thomas Jefferson, The First Pagan Historian offers the first comprehensive account of Dares' rise and fall. Along the way, it reconstructs Dares' central place in longstanding debates over the nature of history, fiction, criticism, philology, and myth, from ancient Rome to the Enlightenment.
Author: Jacqueline Klooster
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2018-05-01
Total Pages: 303
ISBN-13: 9004365850
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Homer and the Good Ruler in Antiquity and Beyond focuses on the important question of how and why later authors employ Homeric poetry to reflect on various types and aspects of leadership. In a range of essays discussing generically diverse receptions of the epics of Homer in historically diverse contexts, this question is answered in various ways. Rather than considering Homer’s works as literary products, then, this volume discusses the pedagogic dimension of the Iliad and the Odyssey as perceived by later thinkers and writers interested in the parameters of good rule, such as Plato, Philodemus, Polybius, Vergil, and Eustathios.
Author: Sarah Van der Laan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2024-02-22
Total Pages: 323
ISBN-13: 0198778295
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The Choice of Odysseus demonstrates how the Odyssey provided Renaissance authors and readers with a poetic ethics for their age. Sarah Van der Laan reconstructs Renaissance readings of the Odyssey by Petrarch, Poliziano, Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, Monteverdi, and Milton to recover a powerful Renaissance tradition of Odyssean epic.
Author: Robert S. Miola
Publisher: MHRA
Published: 2017-09-11
Total Pages: 482
ISBN-13: 1781881189
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Famously praised by John Keats for speaking ‘loud and bold’, Chapman’s Homer brought Greek poetry and civilization to life for centuries of readers. Many have praised its rough energy and creativity, the crashing power of the verses, its grim depiction of life and death in war. The companion to Gordon Kendal’s edition of Chapman’s Odyssey, this edition of his Iliad features a newly edited version of the 1611 printing (including all the translator’s combative notes and commentary) in modern spelling and punctuation. The introduction, “Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” explores the complicated history of revision behind the text, the intermediate Latin sources, and, most important, Chapman’s early modern reception of the Iliad, that is, the later political, cultural, social, literary, moral, and theological ideas that shape his reading of the ancient Greek text. The edition provides also full textual collations, lexical and explanatory notes, a glossary, bibliography, an appendix on Chapman’s contributions to the English language, and index. Like his great contemporary and rival, William Shakespeare, Chapman was a dramatist and one of the great wordsmiths of the Renaissance, a creator of the language that we speak and write today as Modern English. Chapman’s Iliad deploys the resources of this developing English language for stunning poetic effects; this raw and powerful version of Homer’s inspired song stands also as a masterpiece of English literature.
Author: Rebecca Kingston
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2022-09-29
Total Pages: 457
ISBN-13: 1009243470
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Throughout the early modern period, political theorists in France and England drew on the works of Plutarch to offer advice to kings and princes. Elizabeth I herself translated Plutarch in her later years, while Jacques Amyot's famous translations of Plutarch's The Parallel Lives led to the wide distribution of his work and served as a key resource for Shakespeare in the writing of his Roman plays, through Sir Thomas North's English translations. Rebecca Kingston's new study explores how Plutarch was translated into French and English during the Renaissance and how his works were invoked in political argument from the early modern period into the 18th century, contributing to a tradition she calls 'public humanism'. This book then traces the shifting uses of Plutarch in the Enlightenment, leading to the decline of this tradition of 'public humanism'. Throughout, the importance of Plutarch's work is highlighted as a key cultural reference and for its insight into important aspects of public service.
Author: Bryan Brazeau
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2020-04-16
Total Pages: 312
ISBN-13: 1350078948
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Using new and cutting-edge perspectives, this book explores literary criticism and the reception of Aristotle's Poetics in early modern Italy. Written by leading international scholars, the chapters examine the current state of the field and set out new directions for future study. The reception of classical texts of literary criticism, such as Horace's Ars Poetica, Longinus's On the Sublime, and most importantly, Aristotle's Poetics was a crucial part of the intellectual culture of Renaissance Italy. Revisiting the translations, commentaries, lectures, and polemic treatises produced, the contributors apply new interdisciplinary methods from book history, translation studies, history of the emotions and classical reception to them. Placing several early modern Italian poetic texts in dialogue with twentieth-century literary theory for the first time, The Reception of Aristotle's Poetics in the Italian Renaissance and Beyond models contemporary practice and maps out avenues for future study.
Author: Katherine Maynard
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Published: 2017-12-15
Total Pages: 192
ISBN-13: 081013585X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Reveries of Community reconsiders the role of epic poetry during the French Wars of Religion, the series of wars between Catholics and Protestants that dominated France between 1562 and 1598. Critics have often viewed French epic poetry as a casualty of these wars, arguing that the few epics France produced during this conflict failed in power and influence compared to those of France’s neighbors, such as Italy’s Orlando Furioso, England’s Faerie Queene, and Portugal’s Os Lusíadas. Katherine S. Maynard argues instead that the wars did not hinder epic poetry, but rather French poets responded to the crisis by using epic poetry to reimagine France’s present and future. Traditionally united by une foi, une loi, un roi (one faith, one law, one king), France under Henri IV was cleaved into warring factions of Catholics and Huguenots. The country suffered episodes of bloodshed such as the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, even as attempts were made to attenuate the violence through frequent edicts, including those of St. Germain (1570) and Nantes (1598). Maynard examines the rich and often dismissed body work written during these bloody decades: Pierre de Ronsard’s Franciade, Guillaume Salluste Du Bartas’s La Judit and La Sepmaine, Sébastian Garnier’s La Henriade, Agrippa d’Aubigné’s Les Tragiques, and others. She traces how French poets, taking classics such as Virgil’s Aeneid and Homer’s Iliad as their models, reimagined possibilities for French reconciliation and unity.
