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Featured Book, Episodes 52-7
Sometimes, a book is just amazingly, mind-bendingly useful. During my research on Virgil, David Scott Wilson-Okamura’s Virgil in the Renaissance was my Swiss Army knife. Wilson-Okamura is a Renaissance scholar, but he’s equally at home dealing with Virgil and the Augustan Age, and the enormous, complex textual history of Virgil’s works through antiquity and beyond. Virgil in the Renaissance is at a high level about the reception, circulation, and influence of Virgil after about 1400 – not just in the Anglophone world but throughout Europe and beyond. The book will teach you, once and for all, about the spelling of Virgil’s name, the wacky history of Virgil being thought of as a magician, the curious and unexpected reasons Renaissance poets looked up to Virgil’s career, as well as his writing, along with dozens of other facts that you just can’t get from the poet’s works alone. The book is organized largely around the Eclogues, Georgics, and the Aeneid, so it’s easy to learn about how each of the books was interpreted and perceived during the Renaissance. And while the book may seem like fairly specialized territory, to a large extent it’s about how Christian authors living in an era after courtly love poetry interpreted the pagan classics of a radically different time and place, often revealing their own worldviews. If you’ve never read a work of reception history, you really can’t do better than this one. Additionally Professor Wilson-Okamura maintains a website called virgil.org that is also really useful. In addition to having a searchable database of all of Virgil’s lines in Latin, the site has free hard-to-find English translations of Virgil’s apocryphal short poems, the Virgil biography by Aelius Donatus, and various other Virgil goodies that Wilson-Okamura discusses in Virgil in the Renaissance .
Featured Book, Episodes 46-8
Kathryn Tempest’s Cicero: Politics and Persuasion in Ancient Rome (2011) is an outstanding modern biography of one of Rome’s most famous and important citizens. The book is thorough, judicious, marvelously researched and remarkably accessible, demonstrating Tempest's impressive command of late republican history, as well as her knowledge of Cicero’s vast canon of works. As we learn early in the book, almost 900 letters survive from Cicero’s private correspondence, along with 58 speeches and a shelf full of texts on philosophy, rhetoric, politics and religion. Throughout Cicero , Tempest draws on this vast and challenging oeuvre, along with a multiple eras of scholarship on the ancient Roman orator. Because he was directly involved in so many of the crises and controversies of the late republic, telling the story of Cicero’s life requires a balance between late republican politics on one hand and Cicero’s role in them on the other. Tempest’s biography maintains this balance masterfully, staying closely committed to Cicero’s life from cradle to grave, but also providing lucid historical context, chapter after chapter, and page after page. The result is a graceful and powerful story about an obscure man’s unlikely rise to prominence, about an energetic patriot and a decomposing political system, and moreover about the spellbinding final decades of the Roman republic. Cicero: Politics and Persuasion in Ancient Rome , whether you’re just reading it in an armchair for fun, or as part of a curriculum on classics, is an invaluable window into one of the most influential Romans in history.
Featured Book, Episode 45
Epicureanism was one of the most influential philosophical schools of antiquity. Its deep investment in ancient atomic theory, its famous doctrine of the "swerve" which began all atomic collisions, its graceful moderatism and ethics of living apart from the rough and tumble of politics and society made it the philosophy of choice for many in the Mediterranean world, during the Hellenistic period and afterwards. Tim O'Keefe's Epicureanism (2009) is about the history and structure of this influential philosophy. Like some of my favorite historians of philosophy, O'Keefe combines a robust knowledge of his subject with an approachable and lucid writing style, seasoning his expositions of Epicureanism's tenets with often entertaining examples and anecdotes. The book provides an introduction to the life of Epicurus, his philosophical heirs, and the school's long history. But Epicureanism's bulk is devoted to rich and topically organized accounts of Epicurean physics, epistemology, and ethics. Whether you're curious about ancient science, or the intellectual trends of the pre-Christian world, or you're a philosophy buff of any sort, Tim O'Keefe's Epicureanism takes the entire history of the philosophy, down to the smallest surviving fragments and quotations, and packages it into a single, beautifully written book.
Featured Book, Episodes 42-4
Gesine Manuwald's Roman Replican Theater (2011) is about the development and history of plays, playwrights and stagecraft in the Roman Republic. From 364 BCE onward, Rome begrudgingly began to host staged events - at first mime shows, musical performances and dancers, and eventually, an increasingly diverse body of plays. These plays, most often written by ex-slaves and cultural outsiders, ranged from comedy to tragedy; from grave productions about Roman history to fanciful fusions of earlier Greek comedies; from epic tragedy to improvised strip tease. Roman Republican Theater is a virtuoso work on the subject of theater's evolution in early Rome, written with a seemingly limitless knowledge of both ancient and modern sources, and at the same time a systematic organization that makes the content accessible and user-friendly from end to end. The birth and evolution of Ancient Roman theater is not a very easy subject, and yet Manuwald's knowledge of the topic is so expansive, and the architecture of the book so elegantly clear, that by the time you finish reading the it you'll know all the most important names, events, genres, and formal conventions of Rome's early stagecraft - and you'll also know where to look if you want to read deeper into any given subject, due to her generous annotations and bibliography. For classicists, medievalists, wide-ranging Elizabethans, and curious non-specialists like me, this is a spectacular piece of scholarship.
Featured Book, Episodes 42-4
Denis Feeney's Beyond Greek: The Beginnings of Latin Literature (2016) is a fantastic single volume source on Rome's earliest writers. To the newcomer to Roman literature, the names of Rome's earliest authors - Livius Andronicus, Gnaeus Naevius, Quintus Ennius, and many more - are far less familiar than those of Cicero, Virgil, and Ovid. Latin literature was initially the project of cultural outsiders and ex-slaves - Magna Graecians and others from the fringes of the Italian peninsula whose bi- and often trilingual backgrounds influenced the plays, poems and histories that they wrote. The vast bulk of Latin literature from before the first century BCE has been lost, but nonetheless, buried in the fragments of ancient literary histories and quotations are answers to some important questions. Why did Rome develop a native Latin literature, or a literature at all? Why did the Roman intelligensia, as the Republic transitioned into the Principate, learn to speak Greek and study Greek literature, generation after generation? Sifting through an enormous array of ancient and contemporary sources, Feeney's Beyond Greek explores the earliest Latin literature, offering rich background on the history of translation in the Roman world, key developments in the ludi romani during the Middle Republic, the impact of the First Punic War on early Roman literature, and literacy rates and textual circulation in the Roman world around the turn of the millennium. If you are interested in how, when, where, and why Latin literature began, Beyond Greek is a remarkably clear and thorough resource on the subject - a wonderful choice for your first steps into the literature of Rome.
Featured Book, Summer of 2017
Jerrold Seigel's The Idea of the Self (2005) is a sprawling volume on the history of the notion of selfhood, from Descartes and Leibniz to Foucault and Derrida. I read it during my second-to-last year of graduate school and it zipped together a lot of philosophical loose change floating around in my brain and finished bringing two things together for me. Those two things were, simply put, classical philosophy and critical theory - particularly the French postmodern critical theory that has become standard curriculum to the English major and graduate student. Ever since I'd read Russell's History of Western Philosphy as an undergrad and some of the philosophers therein, it had been my instinct to take like theories and fasten them together, regardless of era. Thus, when we read Derrida's Grammatology his radical subjectivity and textual monism had a certain odor of Parmenides, George Berkeley, and all philosophers who took it upon themselves to express dubeity about the physical world and reliability of the human senses. Jerrold Seigel's book taught me that making such connections - taking the English department's pantheon of beloved postmodern theorists and sticking them in an older framework of philosophical history, was a healthy and rewarding way to understand intellectual history. Seigel's vibrant, accessible prose, his consistent framework of discussing different models of selfhood throughout the book, and his humbling erudition were a tremendous contribution to my own education about philosophy.
Featured Book, Episodes 52-7
Sometimes, a book is just amazingly, mind-bendingly useful. During my research on Virgil, David Scott Wilson-Okamura’s Virgil in the Renaissance was my Swiss Army knife. Wilson-Okamura is a Renaissance scholar, but he’s equally at home dealing with Virgil and the Augustan Age, and the enormous, complex textual history of Virgil’s works through antiquity and beyond. Virgil in the Renaissance is at a high level about the reception, circulation, and influence of Virgil after about 1400 – not just in the Anglophone world but throughout Europe and beyond. The book will teach you, once and for all, about the spelling of Virgil’s name, the wacky history of Virgil being thought of as a magician, the curious and unexpected reasons Renaissance poets looked up to Virgil’s career, as well as his writing, along with dozens of other facts that you just can’t get from the poet’s works alone. The book is organized largely around the Eclogues, Georgics, and the Aeneid, so it’s easy to learn about how each of the books was interpreted and perceived during the Renaissance. And while the book may seem like fairly specialized territory, to a large extent it’s about how Christian authors living in an era after courtly love poetry interpreted the pagan classics of a radically different time and place, often revealing their own worldviews. If you’ve never read a work of reception history, you really can’t do better than this one. Additionally Professor Wilson-Okamura maintains a website called virgil.org that is also really useful. In addition to having a searchable database of all of Virgil’s lines in Latin, the site has free hard-to-find English translations of Virgil’s apocryphal short poems, the Virgil biography by Aelius Donatus, and various other Virgil goodies that Wilson-Okamura discusses in Virgil in the Renaissance .
Featured Book, Episodes 46-8
Kathryn Tempest’s Cicero: Politics and Persuasion in Ancient Rome (2011) is an outstanding modern biography of one of Rome’s most famous and important citizens. The book is thorough, judicious, marvelously researched and remarkably accessible, demonstrating Tempest's impressive command of late republican history, as well as her knowledge of Cicero’s vast canon of works. As we learn early in the book, almost 900 letters survive from Cicero’s private correspondence, along with 58 speeches and a shelf full of texts on philosophy, rhetoric, politics and religion. Throughout Cicero , Tempest draws on this vast and challenging oeuvre, along with a multiple eras of scholarship on the ancient Roman orator. Because he was directly involved in so many of the crises and controversies of the late republic, telling the story of Cicero’s life requires a balance between late republican politics on one hand and Cicero’s role in them on the other. Tempest’s biography maintains this balance masterfully, staying closely committed to Cicero’s life from cradle to grave, but also providing lucid historical context, chapter after chapter, and page after page. The result is a graceful and powerful story about an obscure man’s unlikely rise to prominence, about an energetic patriot and a decomposing political system, and moreover about the spellbinding final decades of the Roman republic. Cicero: Politics and Persuasion in Ancient Rome , whether you’re just reading it in an armchair for fun, or as part of a curriculum on classics, is an invaluable window into one of the most influential Romans in history.
Featured Book, Episode 45
Epicureanism was one of the most influential philosophical schools of antiquity. Its deep investment in ancient atomic theory, its famous doctrine of the "swerve" which began all atomic collisions, its graceful moderatism and ethics of living apart from the rough and tumble of politics and society made it the philosophy of choice for many in the Mediterranean world, during the Hellenistic period and afterwards. Tim O'Keefe's Epicureanism (2009) is about the history and structure of this influential philosophy. Like some of my favorite historians of philosophy, O'Keefe combines a robust knowledge of his subject with an approachable and lucid writing style, seasoning his expositions of Epicureanism's tenets with often entertaining examples and anecdotes. The book provides an introduction to the life of Epicurus, his philosophical heirs, and the school's long history. But Epicureanism's bulk is devoted to rich and topically organized accounts of Epicurean physics, epistemology, and ethics. Whether you're curious about ancient science, or the intellectual trends of the pre-Christian world, or you're a philosophy buff of any sort, Tim O'Keefe's Epicureanism takes the entire history of the philosophy, down to the smallest surviving fragments and quotations, and packages it into a single, beautifully written book.
Featured Book, Episodes 42-4
Gesine Manuwald's Roman Republican Theater (2011) is about the development and history of plays, playwrights and stagecraft in the Roman Republic. From 364 BCE onward, Rome begrudgingly began to host staged events - at first mime shows, musical performances and dancers, and eventually, an increasingly diverse body of plays. These plays, most often written by ex-slaves and cultural outsiders, ranged from comedy to tragedy; from grave productions about Roman history to fanciful fusions of earlier Greek comedies; from epic tragedy to improvised strip tease. Roman Republican Theater is a virtuoso work on the subject of theater's evolution in early Rome, written with a seemingly limitless knowledge of both ancient and modern sources, and at the same time a systematic organization that makes the content accessible and user-friendly from end to end. The birth and evolution of Ancient Roman theater is not a very easy subject, and yet Manuwald's knowledge of the topic is so expansive, and the architecture of the book so elegantly clear, that by the time you finish reading the it you'll know all the most important names, events, genres, and formal conventions of Rome's early stagecraft - and you'll also know where to look if you want to read deeper into any given subject, due to her generous annotations and bibliography. For classicists, medievalists, wide-ranging Elizabethans, and curious non-specialists like me, this is a spectacular piece of scholarship.
Featured Book, Episodes 42-4
Denis Feeney's Beyond Greek: The Beginnings of Latin Literature (2016) is a fantastic single volume source on Rome's earliest writers. To the newcomer to Roman literature, the names of Rome's earliest authors - Livius Andronicus, Gnaeus Naevius, Quintus Ennius, and many more - are far less familiar than those of Cicero, Virgil, and Ovid. Latin literature was initially the project of cultural outsiders and ex-slaves - Magna Graecians and others from the fringes of the Italian peninsula whose bi- and often trilingual backgrounds influenced the plays, poems and histories that they wrote. The vast bulk of Latin literature from before the first century BCE has been lost, but nonetheless, buried in the fragments of ancient literary histories and quotations are answers to some important questions. Why did Rome develop a native Latin literature, or a literature at all? Why did the Roman intelligensia, as the Republic transitioned into the Principate, learn to speak Greek and study Greek literature, generation after generation? Sifting through an enormous array of ancient and contemporary sources, Feeney's Beyond Greek explores the earliest Latin literature, offering rich background on the history of translation in the Roman world, key developments in the ludi romani during the Middle Republic, the impact of the First Punic War on early Roman literature, and literacy rates and textual circulation in the Roman world around the turn of the millennium. If you are interested in how, when, where, and why Latin literature began, Beyond Greek is a remarkably clear and thorough resource on the subject - a wonderful choice for your first steps into the literature of Rome.
Featured Book, Summer of 2017
Jerrold Seigel's The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century (2005) is a sprawling volume on the history of the notion of selfhood, from Descartes and Leibniz to Foucault and Derrida. Using a simple and consistent framework to understand centuries of ideas about selfhood, Seigel's book is a particularly indispensible for those of us wishing to connect twentieth-century critical theory and postmodernism with enlightnement, early modern, and even medieval and classical philosophy.
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