The Birth of Tragedy in the Cinquecento: Humanism and Literary History

Humanist literary historians treated Aristotle’s ‘Poetics’ in a distinctive way: as a historical source. How had the Greek tragedy arisen, what was its relation to the comedy, and how was it performed? They approached Aristotle’s scanty and confusing words with a repertoire of methods: bold inference and exegesis, textual criticism, and above all comparison with Roman texts. These discussions were deeply relevant to the rise of the opera around 1600. Angelo Poliziano, Francesco Robortello, Piero Vettori, and Francesco Patrizi da Cherso are examined

Aristotle My Beloved: Poetry, Diagnosis, and the Dreams of Julius Caesar Scaliger

Notoriously Aristotelian in his poetic theory, linguistics, and natural philosophy, Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484–1558) also reimagined the lost love poetry that Aristotle himself was said to have written. Scaliger’s New Epigrams of 1533 combine a distinctively humanist view of Aristotle as an elegant polymath with a sustained experiment in refashioning the Petrarchan love lyric. Most visibly in poems about dreams and dreaming, Scaliger educes his speaker’s erotic despair from philosophical problems in contemporary Aristotelian accounts of the soul, knowledge, and personal identity. The strange but compelling texts that result form a crossroads for Scaliger’s own identities as physician, philosopher, and poet

I. Scriptural Authority and Biblical Criticism in the Dutch Golden Age: God’s Word Questioned [Book Review]. II. Criticism and Confession: The Bible in the Seventeenth-Century Republic of Letters [Book Review]

Two outstanding new volumes on the 17th-century criticism of the bible apply a vital and current question: did scholarly criticism emerge in spite of theology or because of it

Richard Bentley: Poetry and Enlightenment

Bentley was the most famous classical scholar in Europe at a time when this meant a great deal. But he provoked continual controversy by his bold methods and pugnacious personality. In the world of England, both Bentley and his rivals Swift and Pope apparently wished to be known for classical knowledge as much as personal taste. In the international Latin-speaking realm, Bentley faced the universal opinion that no one could equal the great scholars of the Renaissance. If later generations admire Bentley, then, his life in his own time was uncertain, uncomfortable, and fundamentally experimental

A French Jesuit's Lectures on Vergil, 1582-1583: Jacques Sirmond between Literature, History, and Myth

An unstudied manuscript in Princeton contains lectures delivered by the youthful Jacques Sirmond at the Jesuit college of Pont-a-Mousson. In contrast to the received picture of Jesuit pedagogues as devoted rhetoricians, Sirmond explained Aeneid books 3 and 12 in a self-consciously historical way, concentrating especially on Roman law and religion and their interaction. His concerns are discussed in light of sixteenth-century scholarship on ancient Rome, contemporary Vergil commentary, humanist interest in the history of culture as a hermeneutic tool, and Sirmond's own later career as a philologist and ecclesiastical historian. Sirmond's comments on Aeneid 12 in particular show how he used religious and legal information in an unusual ethical reading of Vergil's text. Like some other early modern readers, Simond read Vergil's poem, other ancient literary texts, and Roman historical texts and documents as equivalent and interchangeable sources of information

Controversy, Competition, and Insult in the Republic of Letters

The newest research on the Republic of Letters is short on polite gentlemen and long on cranks, theologians, and professors. A review essay

Chivalry and Romance in the Eighteenth Century: Richard Hurd and the Disenchantment of the 'Faerie Queene'

[Introduction]. In the middle years of the eighteenth century, Richard Hurd decided that the whole previous history of literary criticism was a chronicle of obsessions with non-problems. It was in his search for an actual problem that Hurd hit upon the Middle Ages. The result, Hurd's Letters on Chivalry and Romance of 1762, has long been a primary exhibit in the story of how the eighteenth century rediscovered medieval literature and culture. In this set of essays, Hurd canvasses what he takes to be the central characteristics of medieval courtly life, then discusses several postmedieval epic poems and their relationship to this medieval ("gothic") world. In his remarks on Ariosto, Tasso, Milton, and above all Spenser- whose Faerie Queene stands at the theoretical core of the argument - Hurd elaborates a new, "gothic" poetics supposed to be based in the conditions of medieval culture itself, and which Hurd contends is better suited to these poems than Aristotelian ("classical") poetics with its demand for a particular kind of narrative unity. Hurd is also diffuse on the virtues of the "gothic idea of poetry" in its own right, particularly on the pleasing effects of fairies and other elements of "superstition." which he considers aesthetically superior, qua superstition, to the anthropomorphic gods in Homer (48-55). In short, says Hurd, the gothic style affords an ideally wide scope to the poetic imagination and is "peculiarly suited to the views of a genius"; if Spenser and his fellow poets were "seduced" by the gothic "barbarities of their forefathers," theirs was a fortunate fall (4)

Campanella and the Disciplines from Obscurity to Concealment

During 27 years in prison, Tommaso Campanella became a European celebrity by publishing natural philosophy, political philosophy, and more. What was it like to write in prison in the 17th century, and did those conditions leave any traces in his books? By comparison with the chaotic style of his earlier career, Campanella usually became clearer and more appealing, relying much less on books and more on original argument. On the other hand, his abiding interest in republican political thought demanded an alert and even sympathetic reader as Campanella ostensibly opposed republicanism with disputations and authorities that recalled his youth

Imagined Universities: Public Insult and the Terrae Filius in Early Modern Oxford

[Introduction]. On a Saturday afternoon in July of 1669, a master of arts named Henry Gerard rose to address a crowd of academics and spectators in the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford. A public Act for granting degrees was in progress, and nominally, Gerard was one of several opponents who were to challenge the incepting master of arts William Watts in a ceremonial disputation on three philosophical topics: Is knowledge memory (An scientia sit reminiscentia)? Is all sensation touch (An omnis sensus sit tactus)? Are the planets habitable (An planetae sint habitabiles)? Watts was obliged to answer no, yes, and no respectively, so that Gerard, speaking to the second question, was expected to argue that all sensation was not touch. 1 No one would have been surprised, however, when Gerard ostentatiously ignored the stated question and announced his intention instead to 'touch' the doctors, their wives, and the Oxford townsmen-not, however, the townsmen's wives, who according to Gerard suffered from the disease called 'touch me not' .2 Gerard proceeded to insult various members of his audience in academic Latin for nearly an hour. According to him, the Vice-Chancellor John Fell shared one soul, one bed, and one wig with the Regius Professor of Divinity, Richard Allestree; Dr Smith of Christ Church invariably broke his oaths, except when he swore to beggars that he would not give them a penny; the Mayor of Oxford, John Lambe, was a tailor (sartor) and a cuckold who had delivered a simple-minded speech to the visiting Cosimo de Medici earlier that year; Dr John Lamphire, the Camden Professor of Ancient History, was a new Milo of Croton capable of carrying an ox, not on his shoulders, but in his belly. John Evelyn, who was present in the audience, described the speech to his diary as 'a tedious, abusive, sarcastical rhapsodie', and claimed he had advised the authorities that it ought to be 'suppress'd' .3 In fact, the authorities went further, expelling Gerard within two weeks. The diarist Anthony Wood noted with disgust that before Gerard departed, he 'went about to shew his speech', ensuring that many copies would survive in the notebooks of Oxford students and fellows