Classical reception in early modern Europe is often perceived in modern scholarship as being dominated by engagements with Greece and Rome. The essays in this volume aim to challenge this prevailing view by collectively arguing for the significance and familiarity of the ancient near east to early modern Europe as part of a wider classical world.

• List of Illustrations


• List of Contributors


• 0: Jane Grogan: Introduction


• Part I: Routes of Reception


• 1: Noreen Humble: The Well-Thumbed Attic Muse: Cicero and the Reception of Xenophon's Persia in the Early Modern Period


• 2: Dennis Looney: Zoanne Pencaro, an Early Modern Italian Reader of the Ancient Near East in Herodotus


• 3: Galena Hashhozheva: From 'Custom is King' to 'Custom is a Metal': The Early Modern Afterlife of Ancient Scythian Culture


• 4: Su Fang Ng: Reading Ancient Fables from the East: Pierre-Daniel Huet's Two-Origin Aetiology of Romance


• Part II: Materials and Traces


• 5: Ladan Niayesh: Reterritorializing Persepolis in the First English Travellers' Accounts


• 6: Thomas Roebuck: Antiquarianism in the Near East: Thomas Smith (1638 1710) and his Journey to the Seven Churches of Asia


• 7: Megan C. Armstrong: Journeying to an Antique Christian Past: Holy Land Pilgrimage Narratives in the Era of the Reformation


• Part III: Refiguring Sources


• 8: Deirdre Serjeantson: Richard Verstegan and the Symbol of Babylon in the Early Modern Period


• 9: Derval Conroy: Casting Models: Female Exempla of the Ancient Near East in Seventeenth-Century French Drama and Gallery Books (1642 1662)


• 10: Jennifer Sarha: Assyria in Early Modern Historiography


• 11: Jane Grogan: Alexander the Great in Early Modern English Drama


• 12: Edith Hall: Crises of Self and Succession: Cambyses in the English Theatre 1560 1667


• Bibliography


• Index

Jane Grogan is an Associate Professor in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin. She is the author of two monographs, Exemplary Spenser: Visual and Poetic Pedagogy in The Faerie Queene (Routledge, 2009) and The Persian Empire in English Renaissance Writing, 1549-1622 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), as well as various journal articles on classical reception, ekphrasis, early modern epic, and Anglo-Ottoman engagements. She has also edited a collection of essays on Spenser's Mutabilitie Cantos for Manchester University Press (Celebrating Mutabilitie: Essays on Edmund Spenser's Mutabilitie Cantos; 2010) and is currently finishing an edition of William Barker's English translation of Xenophon's Cyropaedia for the MHRA Tudor and Stuart Translation series.