Craig Kallendorf is Professor of Classics and English at Texas A&M University, College Station, USA.
The essays in this collection approach the reception of the Roman poet Virgil in early modern Europe from the perspective of two areas at the center of current scholarly work in the humanities: book history and the history of reading. The first group of essays looks at broader questions, of traditional notions of literary practice and value, or how
Contents: Preface; Philology, the reader and the nachleben of classical texts; Marginalia and the rise of early modern subjectivity; The rhetorical criticism of literature in early Italian humanism from Boccaccio to Landino; Virgil's post-classical legacy; Proverbs, censors and schools: neo-Latin studies and book history; The Virgilian title page as interpretive frame; or, through the looking glass; The Aeneid transformed: illustration as interpretation from the renaissance to the present; In search of a patron: Anguillara's vernacular Virgil and the print culture of renaissance Italy; In the margins of Virgil: Venetian renaissance books in the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana and their early readers; Cristoforo Landino, Andrea Tordi and the reading practices of renaissance humanism; Virgil, Dante and empire in Italian thought, 1300-1500; Inclyta Aeneis: a 16th-century neo-Latin tragicomedy; Ascensius, Landino and Virgil: continuity and transformation in renaissance commentary; Aeneas and the 'new world': Stella's Columbeis and Virgilian pessimism; Indexes.