Variazioni umanistiche su Catullo Il caso di Nicolò d'Arco

Nicolò d’Arco (Trentino, Northern Italy) was an appreciated Latin poet and courtier of the first half of the sixteenth century, connected to the House of Gonzaga and to Mantua. His collection of verses, the so-called Numeri, contains erotic, political, and religious texts in Latin, addressed to many different patrons and friends. This paper focuses on an elegy in which the poet shows a strong and individual imitation of Catullus, and seeks to underline the relationship between the neo-Latin poet and the classical author.

ANIMAL REVOLT AND LINES OF FLIGHT IN LUCRETIUS, BOOK FIVE

Lucretius is the first classical author to have written a history of animal resistance. In a fifty-line passage from Book Five of De rerum natura, the ‘animal revolt’ (5.1297–349), Lucretius describes the rise of empire and its instrumentalization of animals for war. When the animals are led onto the battlefield, however, they swerve against their ‘armed teachers and savage masters’ (1311). The linear rise of empire, built on the abuse of animals’ bodies, is deterritorialized by those same animal bodies in a chaotic scene that takes place on what Monica Gale has called a ‘cosmic battlefield’. This paper follows Lucretius’ account in Book Five of De rerum natura of the linear rise of empire, its increasing capture of animal life, and the rupture of empire's linear trajectory by a clinamen, or ‘swerve’, of rebel animals. I compare Lucretius’ account of the rise of empire to what Deleuze and Guattari call a ‘molar line’, and the swerve of rebel animals to Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the ‘line of flight’.

‘Our Fellow Shakespeare’: A Contemporary Classic in the Early Modern University

This essay discusses the reception of Shakespeare’s works among the students and fellows of early modern Oxford and Cambridge. Taken at face value, the documentary record would seem to suggest that Shakespeare had no place there, as authorities at the two English universities aimed to prevent the presence of his work in the academic sphere. However, this essay uses a variety of literary and archival evidence to show that Shakespeare’s works not only entered into scholarly discourse, but also achieved a status that had previously been reserved for ancient authors. I argue that the best window into Shakespeare’s reception among early modern scholars can be found in academic drama, and I examine two university theatrical productions that engage closely with his works: the Parnassus plays, performed at Cambridge between 1598 and 1601, and Narcissus, performed at Oxford in 1602. These plays not only provide early examples of Shakespeare’s reception among intellectuals, but also illustrate how the scholars of Oxford and Cambridge figured Shakespeare as a ‘classical’ author—an author as worthy of imitation as Homer or Ovid. The process of establishing Shakespeare as a ‘classic’ in the academic setting, this essay ultimately argues, began much earlier than scholars have realized.

ALL THIS GOETHE: CULT AND ANTICULT

The article examines the almost religious worship of Goethe as an unattainable universal genius and classical author, analyzing both the «Goethe cult» and the «anti-cult» in the German culture before the first half of the 20th century. The Goethe cult, that had started shortly after his death, largely contributed to the development of modern literary studies as a new science in Europe. The anniversary years invariably intensified the cult. Resistance to this cult became especially noticeable after WWI when, for the first time, a real «anti-cult» unfolded. It is documented, for example, in a series of articles by comedian C. Sternheim (1878-1942), where Goethe appears as the symbol for «Kulturphilister», in the «Steppenwolf» by H. Hesse, essays by Ortega y Gasset. The «standard education» turned Goethe into a «blank sign», referring to the national-patriotic cult of the «classics». Both the cult of Goethe and his anti-cult turned out to be very productive not only for literature and journalism, but also for literary criticism.

Using classical reception to develop students’ engagement with classical literature in translation

While observing A-level students at my PP2 school, I noticed that their responses to classical texts largely consisted of the identification of stylistic tropes. The students could identify a text's stylistic features but they struggled to articulate and develop their own personal reactions to the text. They had been well-trained in this sort of ‘feature-spotting’ and therefore their reading experience was narrowly mechanical rather than genuinely exploratory. Every passage they encountered was put through the same analytical process with the unsurprising result that every classical author ended up sounding much the same. This seemed to me to be fundamentally passive way of engaging with literature. I was struck by Muir's contention that ‘the pupil should not be a passive recipient in the study of literature’ (!974, p.515). Hence, I wanted to devise a teaching strategy that would enable my students to be more active in the formulation of a personal response to the text.

‘Help me please my hedge-school master’: Virgilian Presences in the Work of Seamus Heaney

This article traces Virgilian presences in Seamus Heaney's oeuvre, from Field Work (1979) to Human Chain (2010). Virgil appears under many guises in Heaney's poetry: in work published in the mid-1970s, he is a character from The Divine Comedy; by the turn of the millennium he had become the classical author of the Eclogues and certainly of the Aeneid. The article analyses this evolution, and suggests that, while Virgil remained a guide for the poet in troubled times, the transition from a Christian to a classical Virgil reflects a movement towards secularisation and globalisation in Heaney's oeuvre.

Om Kilderne til kilderne. Birger Munk Olsen og studiet af de latinske klassikere indtil år 1200

Erik Petersen: Fontes Fontium. Birger Munk Olsen and the Study of the Latin Classical Authors up to 1200 In this presentation, the basic intentions, definitions and overwhelmingly rich results of professor Birger Munk Olsen’s magisterial opus magnum L’Étude des auteurs classiques latins aux XIe et XIIe siècles are briefly described. The first volume of L’Étude was published in 1982, the sixth and latest volume (= tome IV. 2) in 2014. BMO includes 57 authors from the end of the third century B.C. to the beginning of the fourth A.D. in his catalogue of Latin classical manuscripts copied in the 9th to the 12th centuries. The rationale for including the 9th and 10th centuries is that readers in the 11th and 12th centuries were still using books copied in the previous centuries. BMO also makes references to manuscripts copied before 800, the period covered by E. A. Lowe in Codices Latini Antiquiores. Since Bernhard Bischoff’s Katalog der festländischen Handschriften des neunten Jahrhunderts, mit Ausnahme der wisigotischen had not yet been published, the truly pioneering effort of BMO is related to his meticulous descriptions of the huge number of classical manuscripts copied in the period from the Carolingian Renaissance to the Renaissance of the 12th Century. His catalogue of individual manuscripts is followed, in vol. III. 1, by an equally detailed catalogue of the Latin classics in the libraries of the Middle Ages, based primarily on information collected in individual manuscripts and in a variety of medieval book lists and inventories. The two most recent volumes, La réception de la littérature classique. Travaux philologiques (IV. 1), and La réception de la littérature classique. Manuscrits et textes (IV. 2) are dedicated to broader issues of copying, reading and using texts and manuscripts, in a more synthetic manner than in the previous volumes. Still they draw upon BMO’s myriads of observations of details in the manuscripts and the experience of a long life in the company of the people who produced the books and used them.Denmark’s role in preserving and promoting classical literature during the Middle Ages was of little significance and less glory. During the Carolingian Renaissance Vikings were known to steal or destroy books rather than to read them. In the 12th century they had become less belligerent, perhaps, but still not very adaptive to classical literature. Of the 33 codices in the Royal Library included in EACL, 32 arrived in Copenhagen in the Early Enlightenment or later and had not been copied or studied in Denmark in the Middle Ages. Saxo Grammaticus marks a turning point, well-read in and dependent on classical authors as he was, but he completed his Gesta Danorum in the early years of the 13th century. However, he is known to have used a Justinus codex copied before the turn of the century, preserved in the Royal Library as GKS 450 2º. It was probably brought to Denmark from France by Archbishop Absalon, who lent it to Saxo and bequeathed it to the Cistercian monastery at Sorø. It remains a remarkable fact that the Justinus codex is the only extant manuscript of a Latin classical author recorded as being in Denmark before 1200. With the results of years of concentrated, hardcore research assembled in his L’Étude des auteurs classiques latins aux XIe et XIIe siècles Birger Munk Olsen has more than amply compensated for the meagre attention paid to the classics in early medieval Denmark. To the immense benefit of the scholarly community he has laid a new foundation for the study of the Latin classical authors, their transmission, use and history, which will surely prove indispensable for generations.