Redeeming The Text, Reception Studies, and the Renaissance

Abstract

I offer some thoughts on RTT, its goals, and its impact over the past two decades on classical literary studies and on reception studies, from the perspective of a Latinist who received the same initial training as Martindale (we both read ‘Greats’, the traditional course in classics, at Oxford within two years of each other), before embarking on a path that led through areas of what was at that time called classical ‘tradition’ rather than ‘reception’, and then back to research that focussed on classical Latin texts but was not innocent of what I had learned about the classical tradition. In the ‘Preface’ to his first book John Milton and the Transformation of Classical Epic (Martindale 1986) (published, as it happens, in the same year, 1986, as my own first book, Virgil’s Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium), Martindale tells us that his own interest in what he then called ‘influence’, rather than ‘reception’, began while he was still a student at Oxford, and was encouraged by the pedagogical demands of the interdisciplinary ethos at Sussex University. The difference between that (excellent) book on the influence of the classics on Milton and RTT, published nine years later, hints at something like an experience on the road to Damascus, from which Martindale emerged as one of the leading theorists in the development of new approaches to Latin literature and its (now) ‘reception’. These are approaches that have very much influenced my own work on Latin literature over the past quarter-century. I have also kept up an interest in the reception of Latin literature, particularly in the Renaissance, and Martindale invited me to be a co-editor (with Patrick Cheney) of the Renaissance volume in the Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (Cheney and Hardie, forthcoming). I should however put up my hand and admit that I am one of those who have not energetically ‘taken up RTT’s challenge to theorize’ (‘Reception – a new humanism?’ p. 171), although I hope that Martindale would not condemn me to the circle of those tarred with the brush of ‘traditional positivistic enquiry’.