Exhaustive Variety

Abstract

In 1997 Princeton University Press published a new edition of E. F. M. Benecke's translation of Domenico Comparetti's 1872 classic Vergil in the Middle Ages. Even today, almost 140 years after its initial publication, Comparetti's overview of Virgil's Nachleben in the European Middle Ages remains a monument of literary scholarship and still holds a seminal and influential place in Virgilian reception studies. However, as David Scott Wilson-Okamura remarks in the opening of his new book, there ought to have been a sequel: a book which would survey what Virgil meant to his Renaissance readership. This is precisely the challenge Wilson-Okamura takes on in Virgil in the Renaissance. Having sifted through the numerous individual studies and specialised research on Virgil's Renaissance afterlives, in this book Wilson-Okamura attempts to produce a summarising statement about how Virgil's reception continued into the early modern period. The editors of a recent anthology, The Virgilian Tradition: The First 1500 Years (2008), compared sorting through the complex web of interpretations, commentaries, and editions that Virgil's texts elicited to struggling through a confusing and impenetrable ‘primordial jungle’. Wilson-Okamura's new book can be seen as the first attempt to provide a comprehensive map of the Renaissance portion of this jungle. The result is a book that has much to appeal to both specialists of the Virgilian tradition and readers of Renaissance poetry in general. For here is a book that can not only help us gain our bearings but which contains many fresh insights into larger questions about Virgil's influence on Renaissance poetry.