Overview

Though the subject of classical reception in early modern Europe is a familiar one, modern scholarship has tended to assume the dominance of Greece and Rome in engagements with the classical world during that period. The essays in this volume aim to challenge this prevailing view by arguing for the significance and familiarity of the ancient near east to early modern Europe, establishing the diversity and expansiveness of the classical world known to authors like Shakespeare and Montaigne in what we now call the 'global Renaissance'. However, global Renaissance studies has tended to look away from classical reception, exacerbating the blind spot around the significance of the ancient near east for early modern Europe. Yet this wider classical world supported new modes of humanist thought and unprecedented cross-cultural encounters, as well as informing new forms of writing, such as travel writing and antiquarian treatises; in many cases, and befitting its Herodotean origins, the ancient near east raises questions of travel, empire, religious diversity, cultural relativism, and the history of European culture itself in ways that prompted detailed, engaging, and functional responses by early modern readers and writers. Bringing together a range of approaches from across the fields of classical studies, history, and comparative literature, this volume seeks both to emphasize the transnational, interdisciplinary, and interrogative nature of classical reception, and to make a compelling case for the continued relevance of the texts, concepts, and materials of the ancient near east, specifically, to early modern culture and scholarship.

Full Product Details

Author:   Jane Grogan (Associate Professor of Renaissance Literature, Associate Professor of Renaissance Literature, School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin, Ireland)
Publisher:   Oxford University Press
Imprint:   Oxford University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 16.10cm , Height: 2.90cm , Length: 23.40cm
Weight:   0.001kg
ISBN:  

9780198767114

ISBN 10:   0198767110
Pages:   356
Publication Date:   23 April 2020
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   To order  
Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations List of Contributors 0: Jane Grogan: Introduction Part I: Routes of Reception 1: Noreen Humble: The Well-Thumbed Attic Muse: Cicero and the Reception of Xenophon's Persia in the Early Modern Period 2: Dennis Looney: Zoanne Pencaro, an Early Modern Italian Reader of the Ancient Near East in Herodotus 3: Galena Hashhozheva: From 'Custom is King' to 'Custom is a Metal': The Early Modern Afterlife of Ancient Scythian Culture 4: Su Fang Ng: Reading Ancient Fables from the East: Pierre-Daniel Huet's Two-Origin Aetiology of Romance Part II: Materials and Traces 5: Ladan Niayesh: Reterritorializing Persepolis in the First English Travellers' Accounts 6: Thomas Roebuck: Antiquarianism in the Near East: Thomas Smith (1638 1710) and his Journey to the Seven Churches of Asia 7: Megan C. Armstrong: Journeying to an Antique Christian Past: Holy Land Pilgrimage Narratives in the Era of the Reformation Part III: Refiguring Sources 8: Deirdre Serjeantson: Richard Verstegan and the Symbol of Babylon in the Early Modern Period 9: Derval Conroy: Casting Models: Female Exempla of the Ancient Near East in Seventeenth-Century French Drama and Gallery Books (1642 1662) 10: Jennifer Sarha: Assyria in Early Modern Historiography 11: Jane Grogan: Alexander the Great in Early Modern English Drama 12: Edith Hall: Crises of Self and Succession: Cambyses in the English Theatre 1560 1667 Bibliography Index

Reviews

...there can be no doubt it contains excellent, distinguished work and will become a touchstone for researchers interested in the subject. * Raphael Magarik, University of Illinois, Chicago, Bryn Mawr Classical Review *

Author Information

Jane Grogan is an Associate Professor in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin. She is the author of two monographs, Exemplary Spenser: Visual and Poetic Pedagogy in The Faerie Queene (Routledge, 2009) and The Persian Empire in English Renaissance Writing, 1549-1622 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), as well as various journal articles on classical reception, ekphrasis, early modern epic, and Anglo-Ottoman engagements. She has also edited a collection of essays on Spenser's Mutabilitie Cantos for Manchester University Press (Celebrating Mutabilitie: Essays on Edmund Spenser's Mutabilitie Cantos; 2010) and is currently finishing an edition of William Barker's English translation of Xenophon's Cyropaedia for the MHRA Tudor and Stuart Translation series.

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