In the Historia del Mondo nuovo (1565) by Girolamo Benzoni, an illustrated scene of an execution perpetrated on a Spanish prisoner acquires a particular significance in the symbolic framework of the text. The article shows how this scene draws not only on the tradition of the crónicas de Indias, but also on ancient historiography. A closer examination of both the text and the images may help pose a question of Quellenforschung, concerning the chronology of the sources, while also highlighting a problematic survival of antiquity.
In the United States during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Terence was widely read and admired for his style and moral authority. Two details from the poet’s Suetonian biography, which was often included in editions of his plays, sparked the early American imagination: Terence was a freedman, and he was an African with dark skin (colore fusco). From the Roman civil war to the American one, one particularly popular line was often cited to establish Terence as an early authority on humanism: ‘I am a human: I think that nothing human can be foreign to me’ (Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto, Heauton Timorumenos 77). Both this line and Terence himself appear as exempla in antebellum discussions of morality, race, slavery, and what it means to be human. Haunted by a tension between the universal and the particular, the early American Terence both challenged and reinforced the fantasy of a Western literary canon by suggesting to readers that it had always already contained at least one Black man—even as Phillis Wheatley Peters wondered why ‘one alone.’
Scholars such as Annabel Patterson, John Monfasani, and James Biester have shown that, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the rhetorician Hermogenes of Tarsus (2nd century AD) enjoyed significant circulation and influence in England and across Europe. Building on their work, this article examines the presence of his treatise On Ideas of Style (Περὶ ἰδεῶν) within the pedagogical environments of Cambridge and Oxford during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Drawing on the universities’ curricula, records of ownership, annotated copies and remarks by scholars at both universities, the article analyses Hermogenes’s institutional role as a rhetorician formally prescribed by university statutes and positioned within advanced rhetorical instruction. The evidence from both universities indicates that engagement with Hermogenes took place within a broader culture of sustained engagement with Greek language and literature, even though, in practice, this engagement was often mediated through Latinity as a principal means of indirect access to his seven ‘ideas’ of style. Archival materials also reveal networks of book circulation and scholarly exchange between England and Continental Europe that shaped the transmission and reception of Hermogenes at different stages. Taken together, this evidence offers a reassessment of Hermogenes’s place in early modern rhetorical education in England and illuminates the wider constellation of texts that accompanied the incorporation of his ‘ideas’ into the literary culture of the period.
This study examines the representation of Sappho’s objectified body in early twentieth century illustrated books, exploring the relationship between materiality, textuality, and visuality in the popular construction of Sappho’s likeness. I argue that images of Sappho during the period were shaped by two primary vectors of influence: the literary Decadence of the fin de siècle and new arenas of scientific inquiry including papyrology, archaeology, ethnography, and sexology. In their various depictions of Sappho as a museum artefact, a chipped pottery shard, a crumbling statue, and a fragmenting body, the illustrations examined in this study exhibit a particular mode of representing Sappho and elicit a particular type of look from readers/viewers. Sappho is not only objectified, but the illustrations invite the objectifying gaze from those who view her. Tracing the ways in which imperialist and orientalist fantasies exerted influence on—and were disseminated through—illustrated editions demonstrates the important yet often overlooked role that circulatory and popular media played in constructing an exoticized image of Sappho and the ancient world more broadly.
This study explores the display history of the Betende Knabe, a Greek bronze statue currently in Berlin, exploring the interplay between this enigmatic figure and its ever-changing role within the spaces it has inhabited. The article analyses how the object’s presentation has evolved throughout its travels, from private collections to prestigious museums, bearing silent witness to seismic shifts in European history. By considering the Betende Knabe as a site of artistic expression and a platform for political commentary, the article offers a richer understanding of the relationships between art, display, and power structures within museum and gallery walls.
The first translation of the pseudo-Virgilian Culex into a vernacular language, published by Spenser in 1591, was prefaced with a sonnet, which has always been read as a dedication to his deceased patron, the Earl of Leicester. It can also, however, be interpreted as a prosopopoeia, in which 'Virgil' is presented as addressing Octavian, in an extension of the Culex proem inspired by and modelled on the so-called 'pre-proem' of the Aeneid, which Spenser had already translated as the opening of The Faerie Queene. The simple shift of perspective which enables us to see this alternative in the ambiguous sonnet turns out to have surprisingly far-reaching implications, revealing striking continuities in the forms taken by Virgilian reception (involving pseudepigraphy, biofiction and allegorical interpretation) from antiquity to late sixteenth-century England. The act of translation itself, in Spenser's conception-informed by Laurence Humphrey's 1559 treatise, Interpretatio linguarum-emerges as an imaginative and creative literary process, in which the identities of the original poet and his translator can merge into one.
This essay argues that Bernarda Ferreira de Lacerda responded in a highly innovative way to questions of genre and gender in her Soledades de Buçaco (1634). Through a careful reading of the literary models cited in the paratexts, I will not only point out her detailed knowledge of the classical tradition, but also demonstrate how she encourages to read her poem allegorically. On one hand, this will allow us to view the work as an ambitious poetic project and a truly original reflection on which is the best possible poetic form for the subject she deals with. On the other, my close reading of some of the (post-)classical citations will reveal the poet’s witty inversion of gender roles, in such a way that the Carmelite monks end up ‘deflowered’ by a personified Bussaco. Stretching the boundaries of genre and gender, Lacerda offers the reader a new poetic model.
Este trabajo estudia la recepci & oacute;n de la figura de Medea en la poes & iacute;a griega contempor & aacute;nea. En primer lugar, se analiza el contexto del revisionismo m & iacute;tico feminista en Grecia. En segundo lugar, se se & ntilde;alan en la vida y la obra de la poeta Sylvia Plath los elementos que propician su identificaci & oacute;n con Medea. De un lado, la traici & oacute;n del esposo y el suicidio como forma de violencia no vicaria. De otro, la reescritura del mito en su poes & iacute;a. En tercer lugar, se analizan las revisiones del mito de Medea en las poetas griegas Evi Boukli, Konstantina Korryvanti y Chryssa Kontogeorgopoulou. La principal conclusi & oacute;n del estudio es que la presencia de Medea en la poes & iacute;a de estas tres autoras, representativas del fen & oacute;meno po & eacute;tico griego actual, constituye un ejemplo de revisionismo m & iacute;tico feminista y una recepci & oacute;n mediada por la figura y la obra de la poeta Sylvia Plath.
This article examines an unpublished Latin commentary on Isocrates’s Encomium of Helen, written in 1565 by the humanist Francesco Ciceri, professor of rhetoric and classical languages at the Palatine schools of Milan. The text is preserved in MS Guelf. 4262 (Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel). The study analyses Ciceri’s reading practices and his use of a broad range of Greek and Latin sources – classical, medieval, and humanist – within the educational and rhetorical framework of Renaissance civic instruction. The contribution sheds light on the transmission and reception of Isocrates in the Renaissance, the practice of humanist commentary, and the reconstruction of Ciceri’s library as a collector of ancient manuscripts.
This article explores the possibilities offered by digital tools such as textual analysis software and databases for Classical Reception Studies scholars. We argue that the field, and more generally, Classical Studies, needs to move beyond the case-study dynamics that have so far largely dominated these subject areas. This paper advocates for the advantages of using broader evidence and big corpora. This approach allows us to achieve more far-reaching conclusions. Our two examples examine (a) the processing of a corpus of early twentieth-century Spanish newspapers using a textual corpus manager and text analysis software called Sketch Engine, and (b) the work on the ‘Marginalia Paratexta’ database of paratexts and metatexts of classical reception in contemporary mass culture, currently in development by the ‘Marginalia Classica’ research team.
In George Puttenham’s account of pattern poetry in The Art of English Poesy (1589), instead of acknowledging the obvious influence from Hellenistic technopaegnia, the author attributes his sources to the East and presents what he claims are translations of four ‘Oriental’ pattern poems. This article reads Puttenham’s pattern poetry as a case of pseudotranslation, examining both its formation within local contexts and its impacts on the assumed source culture. The first section reassesses Puttenham’s engagement with Greek materials from the perspectives of composition and print design, arguing that his innovation remains indebted to the formal principles of technopaegnia. The second section situates his construction of a foreign source in the context of Renaissance receptions of hieroglyphs, emblems and pattern poems, which are assimilated through the humanist method of absorbing global materials into a classical framework. The final section examines the hypothesis that Puttenham’s examples derive from classical Chinese mono-heptametric poems, later known as pagoda poems. By tracing the modern reception of these poems as visual poetry, this section shows how Puttenham’s pseudotranslation, by inventing a ‘foreign’ source from the author’s intellectual standpoint, effectively affects the later perception of the tradition it claims to represent.
