The Virgilian Tradition

Book History and the History of Reading in Early Modern Europe

Craig Kallendorf

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2023
• eBook ISBN: 9781000938357
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Half Title
• Author
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Illustrations
• I Philology, the reader and the Nachleben of classical texts
• II Marginalia and the rise of early modern subjectivity
• III The rhetorical criticism of literature in early Italian humanism from Boccaccio to Landino
• IV Virgil’s post-classical legacy
• V Proverbs, censors, and schools: neo-Latin studies and book history
• VI The Virgilian title page as interpretive frame; or, through the looking glass
• VII The Aeneid transformed: illustration as interpretation from the Renaissance to the present
• VIII In search of a patron: Anguillara’s vernacular Virgil and the print culture of Renaissance Italy
• IX In the margins of Virgil: Venetian Renaissance books in the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana and their early readers
• X Cristoforo Landino, Andrea Tordi, and the reading practices of Renaissance humanism
• XI Virgil, Dante, and empire in Italian thought, 1300–1500
• XII Inclyta Aeneis: a sixteenth-century neo-Latin tragicomedy
• XIII Ascensius, Landino, and Virgil: continuity and transformation in Renaissance commentary
• XIV Aeneas in the ‘new world’: Stella’s Columbeis and Virgilian pessimism
• Index
• Index of Virgilian passages
• Index of manuscripts
• Index of early printed books