In Italian Readers of Ovid from the Origins to Petrarch, Julie Van Peteghem examines Ovid’s influence on Italian poetry from its beginnings, through Dante, to Petrarch, situating it within the history of reading Ovid in medieval and early modern Italy.

"In this book, Sarah Spence explores the role of Sicily in the European imagination through the myth of Proserpina, who was abducted by the god of the underworld from the same Mediterranean island. Drawing on the author's training in both classics and medieval studies, the book explores how mythic narrative reflects ideas about ancient and medieval empires and engages with debates about the nature of the classical tradition as it evolved during the Middle Ages. Spence argues that the narrative structure of the Proserpina myth, the history of Sicily, and ideas about empire come to reflect, refract, and refine one another through literature, including works by Cicero, Vergil, Ovid, Claudian, and Dante. More broadly, Spence considers the way in which literature offers a space for political deliberation and imagination. While Roman poets focus on Proserpina's abduction as a means for discussing the problems of imperial expansion, for example, high medieval renderings of the myth-invoked in discussions of a new Christian empire shaped by the Crusades-instead focus on the loss of Proserpina, her eventual return, and the necessary negotiations her return involves. In this way, the tale of Proserpina and the history of Sicily trace the changing needs and understandings of empire, literature, and the complicated links between the two"--

A Handbook to the Reception of Ovid presents more than 30 original essays written by leading scholars revealing the rich diversity of critical engagement with Ovid’s poetry that spans the Western tradition from antiquity to the present day. Offers innovative perspectives on Ovid’s poetry and its reception from antiquity to the present day Features contributions from more than 30 leading scholars in the Humanities. Introduces familiar and unfamiliar figures in the history of Ovidian reception. Demonstrates the enduring and transformative power of Ovid’s poetry into modern times.

In this book, Teodolinda Barolini explores the sources of Italian literary culture in the figures of its lyric poets and its “three crowns”: Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Barolini views the origins of Italian literary culture through four prisms: the ideological/philosophical, the intertextual/multicultural, the structural/formal, and the social. The essays in the first section treat the ideology of love and desire from the early lyric tradition to the Inferno and its antecedents in philosophy and theology. In the second, Barolini focuses on Dante as heir to both the Christian visionary and the classical pagan traditions (with emphasis on Vergil and Ovid). The essays in the third part analyze the narrative character of Dante’s Vita nuova, Petrarch’s lyric sequence, and Boccaccio’s Decameron. Barolini also looks at the cultural implications of the editorial history of Dante’s rime and at what sparso versus organico spells in the Italian imaginary. In the section on gender, she argues that the didactic texts intended for women’s use and instruction, as explored by Guittone, Dante, and Boccaccio—but not by Petrarch—were more progressive than the courtly style for which the Italian tradition is celebrated. Moving from the lyric origins of the Divine Comedy in “Dante and the Lyric Past” to Petrarch’s regressive stance on gender in “Notes toward a Gendered History of Italian Literature”—and encompassing, among others, Giacomo da Lentini, Guido Cavalcanti, and Guittone d’Arezzo—these sixteen essays by one of our leading critics frame the literary culture of thirteenth-and fourteenth-century Italy in fresh, illuminating ways that will prove useful and instructive to students and scholars alike.

Giovanni Boccaccio played a pivotal role in the extraordinary emergence of the Italian literary tradition in the fourteenth century, not only as author of the Decameron, but also as scribe of Dante, Petrarch and Cavalcanti. Using a single codex written entirely in Boccaccio's hand, Martin Eisner brings together material philology and literary history to reveal the multiple ways Boccaccio authorizes this vernacular literary tradition. Each chapter offers a novel interpretation of Boccaccio as a biographer, storyteller, editor and scribe, who constructs arguments, composes narratives, compiles texts and manipulates material forms to legitimize and advance a vernacular literary canon. Situating these philological activities in the context of Boccaccio's broader reflections on poetry in the Decameron and the Genealogy of the Gentile Gods, the book produces a new portrait of Boccaccio that integrates his vernacular and Latin works, while also providing a new context for understanding his fictions.

With the advent of the printing press throughout Europe in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, the key Latin texts of Italian humanism began to be published outside Italy, most of them by a small group of printers who, in most cases, worked in close collaboration with lecturers and teachers. This study provides the first comprehensive account of the dissemination of this important literary corpus in Spain, France, the Low Countries and the German-speaking world between ca. 1470 and ca. 1540. By combining an examination of book production and consumption with attention to the educational system of Renaissance Europe, this book highlights both the historical significance of the Latin literature of Italian humanism within the school and university curriculum of the time, and the impact of such a body of texts on the rising national literary traditions, in Latin and in the vernacular, of the period. Printing and Reading Italian Latin Humanism in Renaissance Europe will appeal to scholars of classical and Renaissance literature, and to anyone interested in intellectual history and in the history of education in the Renaissance. It will be of particular interest to scholars in Hispanic studies.

Walter Cohen argues that the history of European literature and each of its standard periods can be illuminated by comparative consideration of the different literary languages within Europe and by the ties of European literature to world literature. World literature is marked by recurrent, systematic features, outcomes of the way that language and literature are at once the products of major change and its agents. Cohen tracks these features from ancient times to the present, distinguishing five main overlapping stages. Within that framework, he shows that European literatures ongoing internal and external relationships are most visible at the level of form rather than of thematic statement or mimetic representation. European literature emerges from world literature before the birth of Europe — during antiquity, whose Classical languages are the heirs to the complex heritage of Afro-Eurasia. This legacy is later transmitted by Latin to the various vernaculars. The uniqueness of the process lies in the gradual displacement of the learned language by the vernacular, long dominated by Romance literatures. That development subsequently informs the second crucial differentiating dimension of European literature: the multicontinental expansion of its languages and characteristic genres, especially the novel, beginning in the Renaissance. This expansion ultimately results in the reintegration of European literature into world literature and thus in the creation of todays global literary system. The distinctiveness of European literature is to be found in these interrelated trajectories.