Overview

A study of how Latin poetry shaped colonial aspirations in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century South and Central America.   Accompanying Iberian colonizers to the Americas, Virgil’s Aeneid inspired generations of colonial elites to write their own epic poems in Latin—priming imaginations for Spanish and Portuguese rule in the Americas. In Empire’s Companion, Erika Valdivieso recovers this lost strain of poetry for classicists and early Americanists alike. Each chapter introduces readers to a new poem that adapts Virgil for a different geographic context. These epics, Valdivieso argues, show elites working to reshape the New World in their own image, drawing on Virgil to think about the conquest of Indigenous peoples, to form new ideas about the globe, and to consider the shifting power dynamics between America and Europe. A powerful corrective to prevailing ideas about the reception of Virgil in the Americas, Empire’s Companion reveals the imperial potential of the Aeneid in the hands of governing elites.

Full Product Details

9780226848266

Table of Contents

Reviews

“Combining skillful close readings, textual philology, and book history with theoretical approaches to colonial history and politics, race and slavery, this book is a groundbreaking contribution both to the elite cultural and literary history of colonial Iberoamerica and to the field of Virgilian reception studies more widely. It deserves a wide readership.” -- Philip Hardie, Trinity College, University of Cambridge “Lucid and illuminating, informed by meticulous research and skilled readings of the four known extant Latin epics produced by writers in the Spanish and Portuguese Americas, Empire’s Companion opens new pathways into both colonial studies and classical reception studies. Both for the quality of the scholarship and for the eloquence of Valdivieso’s prose, this book deserves to become a mainstay in colonial and postcolonial scholarship.” -- Leah Middlebrook, University of Oregon “Empire’s Companion introduces American epics emulating Virgil’s Aeneid. Valdivieso guides readers through commentaries of ancient grammarians, Renaissance humanists, and Jesuit missionaries, offering context via maps, pictographic writing, decorative shields, sculpture, and manuscripts. A boon for scholars and students of epic poetry, Empire’s Companion is a gift to any reader seeking to understand early modern empire building and its enduring cultural consequences.” -- Elizabeth R. Wright, University of Georgia

Author Information

Erika Valdivieso is assistant professor of classics and a member of the Early Modern Studies Program at Yale University.

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