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Euhemerism and Its Uses offers the first interdisciplinary,
focussed, and all-round view of the long history of an important
but understudied phenomenon in European intellectual and cultural
history. Euhemerism - the claim that the Greek gods were
historically mortal men and women - originated in the early third
century BCE, in an enigmatic and now fragmentary text by the
otherwise unknown author Euhemeros. This work, the Sacred
Inscription, has been read variously as a theory of religion, an
atheist's manifesto, as justifying or satirizing ruler-worship, as
a fantasy travel-narrative, and as an early 'utopia'. Influencing
Hellenistic and Roman literature and religious and political
thought, and appropriated by early Christians to debunk polytheism
while simultaneously justifying the continued study of classical
literature, euhemerism was widespread in the middle ages and
Renaissance, and its reverberations continue to be felt in modern
myth-theory. Yet, though frequently invoked as a powerful and
pervasive tradition across several disciplines, it is still
under-examined and poorly understood. Filling an important gap in
the history of ideas, this volume will appeal to scholars and
students of classical reception, mediaeval and Renaissance
literature, historiography, and theories of myth and religion.
For educated poets and readers in the Renaissance, classical
literature was as familiar and accessible as the work of their
compatriots and contemporaries - often more so. This volume seeks
to recapture that sense of intimacy and immediacy, as scholars from
both sides of the modern disciplinary divide come together to
eavesdrop on the conversations conducted through allusion and
intertextual play in works from Petrarch to Milton and beyond. The
essays include discussions of Ariosto, Spenser, Du Bellay, Marlowe,
the anonymous drama Caesars Revenge, Shakespeare and Marvell, and
look forward to the grand retrospect of Shelley's Adonais.
Together, they help us to understand how poets across the ages have
thought about their relation to their predecessors, and about their
own contributions to what Shelley would call 'that great poem,
which all poets...have built up since the beginning of the world'.
-- .
Dubbed 'the English Virgil' in his own lifetime, Spenser has been
compared to the Augustan laureate ever since. He invited the
comparison, expecting a readership intimately familiar with
Virgil's works to notice and interpret his rich web of allusion and
imitation, but also his significant departures and
transformations.This volume considers Spenser's pastoral poetry,
the genre which announces the inception of a Virgilian career in
The Shepheardes Calender, and to which he returns in Colin Clouts
Come Home Againe, throwing the 'Virgilian career' into reverse. His
sustained dialogue with Virgil's Eclogues bewrays at once a
profound debt to Virgil and a deep-seated unease with his values
and priorities, not least his subordination of pastoral to epic.
Drawing on the commentary tradition and engaging with current
critical debates, this study of Spenser's interpretation, imitation
and revision of Virgil casts new light on both poets-and on the
genre of pastoral itself. -- .
Euhemerism and Its Uses offers the first interdisciplinary,
focussed, and all-round view of the long history of an important
but understudied phenomenon in European intellectual and cultural
history. Euhemerism - the claim that the Greek gods were
historically mortal men and women - originated in the early third
century BCE, in an enigmatic and now fragmentary text by the
otherwise unknown author Euhemeros. This work, the Sacred
Inscription, has been read variously as a theory of religion, an
atheist's manifesto, as justifying or satirizing ruler-worship, as
a fantasy travel-narrative, and as an early 'utopia'. Influencing
Hellenistic and Roman literature and religious and political
thought, and appropriated by early Christians to debunk polytheism
while simultaneously justifying the continued study of classical
literature, euhemerism was widespread in the middle ages and
Renaissance, and its reverberations continue to be felt in modern
myth-theory. Yet, though frequently invoked as a powerful and
pervasive tradition across several disciplines, it is still
under-examined and poorly understood. Filling an important gap in
the history of ideas, this volume will appeal to scholars and
students of classical reception, mediaeval and Renaissance
literature, historiography, and theories of myth and religion.
Dubbed 'the English Virgil' in his own lifetime, Spenser has been
compared to the Augustan laureate ever since. He invited the
comparison, expecting a readership intimately familiar with
Virgil's works to notice and interpret his rich web of allusion and
imitation, but also his significant departures and
transformations.This volume considers Spenser's pastoral poetry,
the genre which announces the inception of a Virgilian career in
The Shepheardes Calender, and to which he returns in Colin Clouts
Come Home Againe, throwing the 'Virgilian career' into reverse. His
sustained dialogue with Virgil's Eclogues bewrays at once a
profound debt to Virgil and a deep-seated unease with his values
and priorities, not least his subordination of pastoral to
epic.Drawing on the commentary tradition and engaging with current
critical debates, this study of Spenser's interpretation, imitation
and revision of Virgil casts new light on both poets-and on the
genre of pastoral itself. -- .
Royalist polemic and a sophisticated use of classical allusion are
at the heart of the two 1648 volumes which are the focus of this
study, yet there are striking differences in their politics and in
the ways they represent their relation to poetry of the past.
Pugh's study of these brilliant but neglected poets brings nuance
to our understanding of literary royalism, and considers the
interconnections between politics and poetics. Through a series of
detailed close readings revealing the complex and nuanced
significance of classical allusion in individual poems, together
with an historically informed consideration of the polemical force
of both publishing acts, Pugh aligns the two poets with competing
factions within the royalist camp. These political differences, she
argues, are reflected not only in the idea of monarchy explicitly
articulated in their poetry, but also in the distinctive theories
of intertextuality foregrounded in each volume, Herrick's
absolutism going hand-in -hand with his peculiarly transcendental
image of poetic imitation as an immortal symposium, Fanshawe's
constitutionalism with a distinctly humanist approach. Offering a
new argument for the unity of Herrick's vast collection Hesperides,
and making a case for the rehabilitation of Richard Fanshawe, this
engaging book will also be of wider interest to anyone concerned
with politics in seventeenth-century literature or with classical
reception.
In Spenser and Ovid, Syrithe Pugh gives the first sustained account
of Ovid's presence in the Spenser canon, uncovering new evidence to
reveal the thematic and formal debts many of Spenser's poems owe to
Ovid, particularly when considered in the light of an informed
understanding of all of Ovid's work. Pugh's reading presents a
challenge to New Historicist assumptions, as she contests both the
traditional insistence on Virgil as Spenser's prime classical model
and the idea it has perpetuated of Spenser as Elizabeth I's
imperial propagandist. In fact, Pugh locates Ovid's importance to
Spenser precisely in his counter-Virgilian world view, with its
high valuation of faithful love, concern for individual freedom,
distrust of imperial rule, and the poet's claim to vatic authority
in opposition to political power. Her study spans Spenser's career
from the inaugural Shepheardes Calender to what was probably his
last poem, The Mutabilitie Cantos, and embraces his work in the
genres of pastoral, love poetry, and epic romance.
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