The Virgilian Tradition

by Craig W. Kallendorf

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 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 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.

320 pages, Hardcover

Published September 28, 2007

About the author

Craig W. Kallendorf is Professor of Modern and Classical Languages at Texas A&M University and the author of Vergil and the Myth of Venice: Books and Readers in the Italian Renaissance.

Reviews

[Roman Clodia · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a collection of articles by Craig Kallendorf written over the last twenty or so years and so is a bit of a mixed bag which doesn't necessarily fit together that well.

The overarching themes are Virgilian reception in the Renaissance, and Renaissance reading practises (especially in Italy). There is some really good stuff here (reading title-pages and frontispieces, for example) or re-opening the issue of how humanists actually thought about reading, but there's also some rather mediocre articles that are musings rather than arguments.

What I like is the way Kallendorf has integrated the supposedly separate sub-discuplines of book history and reception, and there's certainly much food for thought. But for a book published in 2007, I had expected something a little more substantial. Stimulating but somewhat sparse.