Classical Latin literature

Since the end of the last century Ennodius has been the object of increasing interest among scholars of late antiquity. Developments in Ennodian criticism are also addressed in this volume that presents the results of more than twenty years of research on the relationship – always dialectical and not infrequently innovative – that Ennodius maintains as a poet with the Latin literary tradition both profane and Christian. The chapters of the book revisit – in English and in one case with substantial modifications – eight of the author’s previously published papers on Ennodius along with one unpublished contribution.

Areas that have been specifically investigated include the functions that he assigns to poetry compared to those he assigns to prose his original re-treatment of some literary genres and his thematic stylistic lexical and metric choices. The last chapter explores the literary influence exerted by Ennodius’ poetry on the text of his epitaph. The very fact that its unknown author – certainly a great admirer of the deceased – did his best to imitate his style is a significant testimony to the prestige that Ennodius enjoyed after his death in the diocese of Pavia of which he had been the bishop.

Ancient commentaries on poetry - due to their heteronomous nature their miscellaneous character and the fact that most of them are transmitted in abridged and anonymous form - are usually not considered ‘authorial’ texts in the same way as poems or literary prose are. On the other hand as didactic texts they rely on authority to convey their interpretation and they also often seem to have been perceived as products of authorial activity as paratexts references and pseudepigraphic attributions demonstrate.

The aim of this volume is to explore this tension and to examine commentaries and scholia on poetry in terms of authorship and ‘authoriality’. The contributions use several Latin and Greek corpora as case studies to shed light on how these texts were read how they display authorial activity themselves and how they fulfil their function as didactic works. They provide reflections on the relationship of author authorship and authority in ‘authorless’ traditions explore how authorial figures and authorial viewpoints emerge in an implicit manner in spite of the stratified nature of commentaries investigate the authorial roles adopted by commentators compilers and scribes and elucidate how commentators came to be perceived as authors in other exegetic traditions.

The 2000th anniversary of Ovid’s death in 2017-2018 led to an upsurge in conferences and publications dedicated to the author’s work and afterlife. One of these is the present volume resulting from the conference Dopo Ovidio. Aspetti della ricezione ovidiana fra letteratura e iconografia which was held on 7-8 May 2019 at the Department of Human Sciences (DSU) of the University of L’Aquila and which looked at various aspects of Ovid’s fortune from a diachronic and interdisciplinary perspective. The contributions cover a period of about fourteen centuries from late antiquity until the end of the eighteenth century and range from late Latin to medieval literature from humanistic production to modern English and Italian literature and from linguistics to the figurative arts. All these studies contribute to a collective appraisal of the multifarious impact of Ovid’s works and especially of the Metamorphoses the latter’s treatment of myth having been a starting point for integrations developments (re)interpretations and representations in isolation or included in an iconographic program.

De l’Italie lombarde à l’Italie humaniste de la renaissance carolingienne à celle de la France et de l’Angleterre aux xii e-xiii e siècles ce volume se propose d’interroger une thématique connue - celle de la fortune des auteurs classiques latins au Moyen Âge - à partir de quelques perspectives nouvelles et en multipliant les types d’approche. Organisées autour de trois axes - la transmission l’exégèse et la réécriture - douze contributions s’intéressent à la manière dont les textes de l’Antiquité tant en prose qu’en poésie ont été cités commentés et réemployés au fil des siècles afin de conserver le patrimoine du passé tout en l’infléchissant pour atteindre des buts nouveaux.

En s’attachant à des produits littéraires variés des œuvres originales à l’univers des gloses des commentaires des florilèges et des miscellanées cette sélection raisonnée d’enquêtes montre comment les auteurs classiques ont connu une vie nouvelle - celle qui les a conduits jusqu’à nous - grâce à la copie et aux échanges à la redécouverte fortuite ou à une renommée solide à travers l’emprunt occasionnel ou le dépouillement systématique l’excerption l’adaptation et les vraies erreurs d’interprétation. Méthode philologique critique littéraire et recherche historique se combinent avec une attention particulière pour les modalités concrètes de la lecture et de l’exploitation des Anciens et conduisent à de multiples approfondissements sur la genèse matérielle et intellectuelle de certaines œuvres : parmi elles plusieurs doivent encore faire l’objet de travaux de première main dont on donne ici les tout premiers résultats.

En devenant le principal support pédagogique des grammatici l’œuvre de Virgile a joué un rôle central dans la formation intellectuelle de la jeunesse lors de l’Antiquité romaine tardive y compris dans la formation rhétorique : les discours - principalement ceux de l’Énéide - ont fourni aux commentateurs du grand poète l’occasion d’expliquer des notions rhétoriques et d’analyser des exemples précis de situations oratoires. Les contributions du présent volume explorent les différentes facettes de cet art virgilien de la parole tel qu’il a été compris par les professionnels de la littérature et de l’éducation de l’Antiquité tardive.

This book stems from a conference on Livy held at the University of Padua on the occasion of the bimillenary of the historian’s death (6-10 November 2017). The aim of the volume is to shed new light on lesser-known aspects of Livy’s historiography by approaching his work from a broad and interdisciplinary perspective. The papers written by established scholars as well as by younger researchers span from classical philology to ancient history and archaeology also incorporating an in-depth investigation of Livy’s reception through the centuries (from the Middle Ages to the Modern Era) and different fields of the humanities (philosophy political thought figurative arts).

Disagreement rivalry and dispute are essential to any intellectual development. This holds true for ancient cultures no less than for us today. From the classical period to the Hellenistic age and to Late Antiquity competition and polemics have shaped the course of intellectual history in Antiquity. Polemical encounters and controversies are often linked to group identities and intellectual networks such as philosophical schools textual traditions artistic circles and religious communities. This collection of studies sprang from the ambition to study the interplay between polemics and intellectual networks from a variety of perspectives and disciplines.

The volume gathers fifteen case studies by leading scholars and young researchers alike. They address a wide range of topics from the Old Academy and the Hellenistic schools to the Neoplatonic commentators of Late Antiquity from biographical literature to literary criticism from artistic manuals to scientific treatises and from pagans to Christians. As multi-sided as the picture that emerges from these case studies may be they all testify to the fact that implicit and explicit polemics are ubiquitous in ancient Greek and Roman literature and have served as triggers of intellectual progress across times and disciplinary boundaries.

The recent publication of the medieval Catalan translation of the Heroids prompts to reflect on crucial questions of literary history and philology: the close and necessary relationship between them and the importance of the study of translations in order to understand Hispanic medieval literatures. Ovid’s impact must be assessed in terms of his presence in Hispanic cultures as a whole and these must be placed within the framework of the European dissemination of Heroids. Moreover the Heroids come to be a touchstone which reveals the important role played by female readers in the promotion and dissemination of Classical tradition in Romance languages a fact that cannot be overlooked when studying the so-called vernacular Humanism in the Iberian Peninsula.

It would be an arduous task to compile all the academic research ever published about Chaucer and his use of sources in the creation of Troilus and Criseyde. But there are still many aspects of Chaucer’s relationship with his sources that have been left largely unexplored. In particular there is yet much to unearth in how the scribes Chaucer’s earliest readers and fundamental agents in the shaping of the poem as we know it now mediated the allusions that Chaucer openly or otherwise introduces in his text. In this paper I explore the different scribal approaches to two of the most notable Latin sources of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde: the portraits of Troilus Criseyde and Diomede in Joseph of Exeter’s Daretis Phrygii Ylias de bello troiano and the summary of the twelve books of the Thebaid. The annotations analyzed in this article allow us a unique glimpse into the process of composition of the poem as well as the twists and turns of its textual history and the expectations had by all the agents involved in the creation transmission and interpretation of Troilus and Criseyde. Furthermore they illuminate different aspects of the familiarity of the reading public with the classical authors in fifteenth-century England.