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.
Author(s): Jane Grogan
Series: Classical Presences
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: xiv+341
Cover
Beyond Greece and Rome: Reading the Ancient Near East in Early Modern Europe
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
Introduction: Beyond Greece and Rome
PART I: Routes of Reception
1: The Well-Thumbed Attic Muse: Cicero and the Reception of Xenophon’s Persia in the Early Modern Period
Cicero on Xenophon’s Cyropaedia and Oeconomicus
Cicero’s Recommendations
Passages Translated and/or Appropriated by Cicero
Cicero in Renaissance Schools
Humanist Readings of Xenophon through Cicero
Cyropaedia
Oeconomicus
Conclusion
2: Zoanne Pencaro, an Early Modern Italian Reader of the Ancient Near East in Herodotus
3: From ‘Custom is King’ to ‘Custom is a Metal: ’The Early Modern Afterlife of Ancient Scythian Culture
The Classical Scythians and Their Later Incarnations
The Trials of Custom in the Renaissance
Herodotus: The Sovereignty of Custom and Two Scythian Honour Killings
Lucian: A Contest of Greek and Scythian Customs
Edmund Spenser: Bending Custom in Ireland
4: Reading Ancient Fables from the East: Pierre-Daniel Huet’s Two-Origin Aetiology of Romance
PART I I: Materials and Traces
5: Reterritorializing Persepolis in theFirst English Travellers’ Accounts
6: Antiquarianism in the Near East: Thomas Smith (1638–1710) and his Journey to the Seven Churches of Asia
Introduction: From Oxford to Asia Minor
Septem Asiae Ecclesiarum Notitia (1672–1716) in Context
The Uses of the Ancient Near East: Smith’s Motivations and His Readership
7: Journeying to an Antique Christian Past: Holy Land Pilgrimage Narratives in the Era of the Reformation
Pilgrimage Treatises
Locating Christ in the Holy Land
The Reformation Context
Re-Rooting the Catholic Faith
Conclusion
PART I I I: Refiguring Sources
8: Richard Verstegan and the Symbol of Babylon in the Early Modern Period
The Tower I: Language
The Tower II: Tyranny
The Harlot
The Exile
Cities Real and Imaginary
9: Casting Models: Female Exempla of the Ancient Near East in Seventeenth-Century French Drama and Gallery Books (1642–62)
Artemisia
Tomyris
Zenobia
Conclusion
10: Assyria in Early Modern Historiography
Assyria as Transmitted Knowledge
Giovanni Boccaccio
Johannes Carion and Philip Melanchthon
Sir Walter Ralegh
11: Alexander the Great inEarly Modern English Drama
Heroic Alexander
Corpsing Alexander
12: Crises of Self and Succession: Cambyses in the English Theatre 1560–1667
Herodotus’ Cambyses and the Early English Theatre
Preston’s Early Elizabethan Cambises between Morality and History Play
The Evasive Diplomacy of Settle’s Restoration Cambyses
Conclusion: Cambyses and the Divided English Self
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Secondary Sources
Index
