This book explores why Renaissance epic poetry clung to fictions of song and oral performance in an age of growing literacy. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poets, Anthony Welch argues, came to view their written art as newly distinct from the oral cultures of their ancestors. Welch shows how the periodās writers imagined lost civilizations built on speech and songāfrom Homeric Greece and Celtic Britain to the Americasāand struggled to reconcile this oral inheritance with an early modern culture of the book. Welchās wide-ranging study offers a new perspective on Renaissance Europeās epic literature and its troubled relationship with antiquity.
Anthony WelchĀ is assistant professorĀ of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.