Beyond Greece and Rome: Reading the Ancient Near East in Early Modern Europe

Description

Though the subject of classical reception in early modern Europe is a familiar one, modern scholarship has tended to assume the dominance of Greece and Rome in engagements with the classical world during that period. The essays in this volume aim to challenge this prevailing view by arguing for the significance and familiarity of the ancient near east to early modern Europe, establishing the diversity and expansiveness of the classical world known to authors like Shakespeare and Montaigne in what we now call the 'global Renaissance'. However, global Renaissance studies has tended to look away from classical reception, exacerbating the blind spot around the significance of the ancient near east for early modern Europe. Yet this wider classical world supported new modes of humanist thought and unprecedented cross-cultural encounters, as well as informing new forms of writing, such as travel writing and antiquarian treatises; in many cases, and befitting its Herodotean origins, the ancient near east raises questions of travel, empire, religious diversity, cultural relativism, and the history of European culture itself in ways that prompted detailed, engaging, and functional responses by early modern readers and writers. Bringing together a range of approaches from across the fields of classical studies, history, and comparative literature, this volume seeks both to emphasize the transnational, interdisciplinary, and interrogative nature of classical reception, and to make a compelling case for the continued relevance of the texts, concepts, and materials of the ancient near east, specifically, to early modern culture and scholarship. Cover Beyond Greece and Rome: Reading the Ancient Near East in Early Modern Europe Copyright Acknowledgements Contents List of Illustrations List of Contributors Introduction: Beyond Greece and Rome PART I: Routes of Reception 1: The Well-Thumbed Attic Muse: Cicero and the Reception of Xenophon’s Persia in the Early Modern Period Cicero on Xenophon’s Cyropaedia and Oeconomicus Cicero’s Recommendations Passages Translated and/or Appropriated by Cicero Cicero in Renaissance Schools Humanist Readings of Xenophon through Cicero Cyropaedia Oeconomicus Conclusion 2: Zoanne Pencaro, an Early Modern Italian Reader of the Ancient Near East in Herodotus 3: From ‘Custom is King’ to ‘Custom is a Metal: ’The Early Modern Afterlife of Ancient Scythian Culture The Classical Scythians and Their Later Incarnations The Trials of Custom in the Renaissance Herodotus: The Sovereignty of Custom and Two Scythian Honour Killings Lucian: A Contest of Greek and Scythian Customs Edmund Spenser: Bending Custom in Ireland 4: Reading Ancient Fables from the East: Pierre-Daniel Huet’s Two-Origin Aetiology of Romance PART I I: Materials and Traces 5: Reterritorializing Persepolis in theFirst English Travellers’ Accounts 6: Antiquarianism in the Near East: Thomas Smith (1638–1710) and his Journey to the Seven Churches of Asia Introduction: From Oxford to Asia Minor Septem Asiae Ecclesiarum Notitia (1672–1716) in Context The Uses of the Ancient Near East: Smith’s Motivations and His Readership 7: Journeying to an Antique Christian Past: Holy Land Pilgrimage Narratives in the Era of the Reformation Pilgrimage Treatises Locating Christ in the Holy Land The Reformation Context Re-Rooting the Catholic Faith Conclusion PART I I I: Refiguring Sources 8: Richard Verstegan and the Symbol of Babylon in the Early Modern Period The Tower I: Language The Tower II: Tyranny The Harlot The Exile Cities Real and Imaginary 9: Casting Models: Female Exempla of the Ancient Near East in Seventeenth-Century French Drama and Gallery Books (1642–62) Artemisia Tomyris Zenobia Conclusion 10: Assyria in Early Modern Historiography Assyria as Transmitted Knowledge Giovanni Boccaccio Johannes Carion and Philip Melanchthon Sir Walter Ralegh 11: Alexander the Great inEarly Modern English Drama Heroic Alexander Corpsing Alexander 12: Crises of Self and Succession: Cambyses in the English Theatre 1560–1667 Herodotus’ Cambyses and the Early English Theatre Preston’s Early Elizabethan Cambises between Morality and History Play The Evasive Diplomacy of Settle’s Restoration Cambyses Conclusion: Cambyses and the Divided English Self Bibliography Primary Sources Secondary Sources Index