Printed and disseminated in concert at the turn of the sixteenth century, classical tragedy and Aristotle’s Poetics reshaped the genre of tragedy in early modern Europe. Greek and Roman tragedians galvanised humanists and schoolmasters to explore new modes of dramatic composition for their Christian audiences; the Poetics, and its auxiliary industry of commentary, offered new hermeneutical categories to reflect on the genre. Yet the biblical tragedy emergent in this period was an awkward fit for the ancient theoretical framework. As Christian narratives were stretched around ancient forms, classical plays and poetics had to be adapted to Christian horizons of expectation, even at the expense of the philological fidelity so cherished by humanists. At the meeting point between two monumental and often irreconcilable textual traditions, the theory and practice of early modern European tragedy was a place of conflict, ingenuity, and new cultural synthesis.

The Classics and the Bible in Early Modern European Tragedy brings together eight leading international scholars to explore the cracks between these fields—poetics and practice, Christian and Classical, Catholic and Protestant—and the new growth that germinated within them. Following an introduction by the two co-editors, Micha Lazarus and Angelica Vedelago, the collection will be divided into two parts. The first, ‘The Poetics of Biblical Tragedy’, will focus on the dialogue between the classics and the Bible in the genre of poetic theory. Surveying both theoretical and dramatic works, the articles focus on the interplay between Aristotelian and Christian poetics (Marc Foecking), tragic and epic poetics (Bryan Brazeau, Blair Hoxby), and the shift from chance to providence in accounts of the genre (Enrica Zanin). The second part of the issue, ‘Theatres of the Bible’, then turns to dramatic practice. Through four case-studies of early modern biblical tragedy, this part explores the dialogue between classics and the Bible in Italy (Elisabetta Selmi, Angelica Vedelago) and the British Isles (Debora K. Shuger, Adrian Streete).

The intersection between classical and Christian traditions in early modern tragedy has received a great deal of scholarly interest in recent years, indicated in our brief Bibliography below. For all this new attention, however, the field remains fresh for exploration. Only recently has the centrality of tragedy to Reformation thought begun to be visible, and it remains to explore the dynamic intellectual and cultural dialogues that surrounded it in all their theoretical, philological, and performative scope. The present proposal pursues precisely this aim by presenting  a selection of papers given at an international conference which took place in Munich on 13 and 15 June 2024, with the support of the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation, the University of Hamburg, the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, and the University of Padua. As one of the leading journals combining literary criticism, literary history, and archival scholarship, we believe that Modern Philology is the perfect destination for this trailblazing collection of interdisciplinary scholarship in the field.

Poetics before Modernity presents a fresh look at the history of literary theory from its ancient beginnings to 1700 CE. It does so by curating new, exploratory work from a team of twelve internationally renowned classicists, medievalists, and Renaissance scholars, into an innovative thematic and chronological structure. Each of our contributors combines granular local detail with the long view of continuity and change in poetic thought across this two-thousand year period. Moreover, the chapters are arranged into four thematic sections – ‘Style’, ‘Genre’, ‘Imagination’, and ‘Hermeneutics’, each a unifying category of premodern poetics – each of which itself traces the coherence of these ideas from their classical roots through medieval and Renaissance developments. These sections thus transport well-known concepts in the history of poetics into uncharted territories, just as they draw new and marginal sources into a long and established tradition. The result is a volume which redraws the map of premodern poetic thought across standard historical and disciplinary boundaries. Recovering traditions that stretch from the earliest papyrus remains of literary theorising in the Western tradition to inspired baroque meditations on the poetics of creation in seventeenth-century Spain, Poetics before Modernity treats this period for the first time as a coherent unit in the history of the subject, and posits both the essential continuity and the inventive range of more than two millennia of poetic thought in the West.

Aristotle’s sixteenth-century readers were the first for a thousand years to be in a position to look beyond the reputation of the Poetics to the text itself. What they found took them far beyond the familiar ethical contexts in which poetics had long been located. Reading across the corpus aristotelicum, Francesco Patrizi advanced a detailed argument that cast the Poetics in a civic light, and Jacopo Mazzoni after him labelled it the ninth book of the Politics. Despite disagreement on technical grounds from commentators such as Paolo Beni, numerous editions of Aristotle’s Opera omnia agreed that the Poetics numbered, at very least, among the moral works. By the seventeenth century, Patrizi’s theories had travelled as far north as England, informing Theodore Goulston’s translation and commentary on the Poetics in 1623 and contributing to developing notions of a civic role for catharsis.

Classical Reformations: Christian Humanism Beyond Erasmus places the classical tradition at the heart of the theology, politics, and literary culture of the European Reformation. Looking beyond the Erasmian model of Christian humanism that dominates the history of the early reform movement, this book focuses instead on the defining influence of Philip Melanchthon and his generation on later phases of the Reformation. Histories of this period tend to decouple classical learning and religious reform. Yet this was not a distinction that Reformation thinkers would have recognised. Major figures such as Melanchthon, Sturm, Ascham, and Beza—no less than many of their Catholic opponents, such as Pole and Bellarmine—were scholars and university lecturers by day, as comfortable with Demosthenes as Deuteronomy. Their Greek and Latin learning actively shaped their formulation of a new Christian teaching during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The new case-studies in Classical Reformations examine the pivotal role of classical thought in Reformation education and polemic, liturgy and literature, theology, politics, and mission. As pagan tests were put to Christian ends, and sacred texts made secular, these studies propose a fundamental renegotiation of what we perceive to be ‘classical’ and ‘Christian’, attesting not only the depth of immersion in the ancient corpus endemic in this period, but also the breadth of the classical inheritance from Europe to the reaches of the Far East.

Marginalia in Roger Ascham’s Greek Isocrates record two decades of tutorials at the pinnacle of Tudor politics. In the early 1550s, Ascham (1514/15–68) and Sir Richard Morison (ca. 1510–56) read ancient Athens into the Reformation as they dispatched diplomatic reports to the Privy Council from the imperial court at Augsburg. Then, almost twenty years later, on 14 November 1568 and just six weeks before his death, Ascham was invited back to Hampton Court for one last tutorial. As Elizabeth I (1533–1603) and her childhood tutor read Isocrates on free speech, frank counsel, and intervention in foreign wars, an anxious faction of humanist courtiers was peering over Ascham’s shoulder, desperate to secure the project of conciliar rule and the future of the English Reformation.

The rough book of Alexander Nowell (c.1514/15–1602) is a remarkable record of the life of a Reformation humanist as he navigated one of the most turbulent periods in English history. At Brasenose College, Oxford in the 1530s, Nowell documented the beginnings of the Oxford tutorial system. As headmaster of Westminster in the 1540s, he was among the first to teach Greek at grammar school, and directed the first performance of a classical tragedy anywhere in England. But no less striking are Nowell’s draft letters, memoranda, shopping lists for students, personal accounts, and list after list of books: 653 entries in all, amounting to a collection of 240 individual titles in a period in which the most senior scholar might have owned just seventy.

The scale of this collection alone marks Nowell as one of the great bibliophiles of his time and offers a major new source for the history of humanism, education, religion, and the book in Tudor England. Nowell’s ownership of evangelical books in particular – in a period when distribution of such books might be punishable by death – supplies long-missing evidence that 1530s Oxford, no less than Cambridge, was hot for reform. Yet the impact of Nowell’s collection reached far beyond his own shelves. At once market commodities, privileged intellectual objects, and means of payment, Nowell’s books circulated among a secondary readership of over 60 named individuals in Henrician Oxford and London, functioning as something like England’s first circulating library.

Alexander Nowell’s Rough Book: The Life and Library of a Reformation Humanist edits these materials from manuscript for the first time, and presents a new and intimate biography of a young humanist and his books at break of day in the English Reformation.

At opposite ends of Reformation Europe, Martin Luther and the Italian Jewish theatre director Leone de’ Sommi both declare that the Jews invented tragedy and the Greeks took the credit. How to explain this unlikely alliance over a still unlikelier account of literary history? De’ Sommi was asserting the value of Jewish culture; Luther was mounting a complex argument against the Catholic canon. De’ Sommi’s sources were Talmudic, Luther’s patristic. Across geography, chronology, and faith, tragedy served as a contested borderland in which to probe the boundaries between history and fiction, scripture and apocrypha, pagan, Jew, and Christian.

Between early summer 1540 and the new year of 1541, Alexander Nowell composed the only surviving Latin letter from England to Sir Thomas Wyatt. On behalf of the Dean and Chapter of Norwich Cathedral, he asks Wyatt, Sir Francis Bryan, and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, to help the new foundation resist the expropriation of its properties. The letter fills in several biographical lacunae for this prominent trio of courtiers.  It provides primary evidence of Wyatt’s membership and sponsorship of English humanist networks.  It offers the first sure evidence of Wyatt’s contact with Surrey, corroborating the evidence of Surrey’s poetry.  It reveals the association of Wyatt, Surrey, and Bryan with evangelical figures: Nowell, later Dean of St Paul’s, was already a central figure in Oxford reform.  And it presents an intricate example of the chains of patronage that reached, in the wake of the dissolution, across the universities, the new fleet of cathedral foundations, and the heights of the Henrician court.

Our decades-long project to disambiguate the two Laurences Nowell is substantially complete. One (c.1516–76) was Dean of Lichfield from 1560 to his death, brother of Alexander Nowell, schoolmaster of Westminster and Dean of St Paul’s. The other (c.1530–69), of greater interest to intellectual history, was an antiquary, cartographer, and pioneer in Old English scholarship, cousin to Alexander. Some outstanding questions, however, remain. In the present note, I adduce evidence from the Vice-Principal’s Register at Brasenose demonstrating that it was Laurence Nowell, not his elder brother Alexander, who left Brasenose to become a schoolmaster in 1546; and Laurence the future Dean of Lichfield, not his cousin Laurence the antiquary, who served as master of the grammar school at Sutton Coldfield from 1546 to 1550.

Archival discoveries reported in Notes and Queries in the past two years have identified the ‘M Streamer’ who narrates most of William Baldwin’s prose satire Beware the Cat (1561) with the real historical figure of Gregory Stremer, contradicting a long-held belief that Baldwin’s narrator was a fiction. The present note sheds another glint of light on Stremer’s London life. It further establishes him as a living person rather than a confection, and suggests that a connection to Westminster is possible after all, perhaps on precisely the ‘semi-formal or independent basis’ that Parsons conjectures.

In 1584, shortly after his bar-mitzvah, the young Italian Jew Leon Modena (1571-1648) composed an eight-line poem so remarkable that it has never been rivalled in its own genre. Known as Kinah Shemor in Hebrew, Chi nasce muor in Italian, this elegy makes sense simultaneously in both languages. It stands at the head of a little-known tradition of short poems, fragments, and fragments of memories of short poems, often composed by Jews and operating at the borders between Hebrew and romance vernaculars, Jewish and Christian communities. More than merely bilingual or macaronic, for Modena the form seems to have existed somewhere between language and music. Yet for want of a formal name, this tradition has long slipped through the cracks of the critical canon.

Leon Modena’s Kinah Shemor publishes the first critical edition and English translation of the poem to take into account all three of its primary witnesses. It places Kinah Shemor in Modena’s thought as a bridge between poetry and music and between Jewish and Christian religious communities, and describes the poem’s afterlife in relation to broader questions of genre theory, critical taxonomy, and the Christian study of Jewish literature in early modern Europe.

An edition and translation of Stephen Gardiner 's letter to John Cheke, 15 May 1542, from De pronuntiatione Graecae potissimum linguae disputationes (1555).

Struck by the solitary beauty of the nightingale’s song, poets and musicians across the literatures of Renaissance Europe drew on an ancient literary topos to contemplate its meaning. Lamenting a lost love, grieving chicks fallen under the plow, puffing and strutting on the springtime prowl: whatever it was, the little bird became an emblem of the work of poetry itself, transmuting experience into song to be captured and transcribed. Yet a parallel branch of this tradition was attracted to another quality of the nightingale’s song—to its pure vocality, its very senselessness. Rather than hear birdsong as a kind of human speech, this countertradition was prompted instead to hear human speech as a kind of birdsong. From Greek to Latin to Italian to English, the nightingale topos became a coded invitation to translingual wordplay, sonic experimentation, and, at its limits, the dismissal of sense entirely in favor of a poetics of pure sound.

This description sounds distinctly modern; musicologists and theorists of translation have begun only recently to look beyond the sense of language to what has been called “the material presence of its signifiers.” This essay makes a first attempt to show, however, that these acoustic phenomena in verse have been mostly overlooked by criticism precisely because of their diffidence toward the work of making sense. Virtuosic displays of sound over sense were not only audible in poetry before the Romantic period (where much recent commentary on lyric imitation has congregated) but even familiar, as a game played on the borders between speech and song, written lyric and musical setting, and the polyglot lyric cultures of Renaissance Europe.

Gathers path-breaking new work on the literary criticism of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Europe and Latin America, a domain of literary and intellectual history which represents one of the richest and most enduring strains of the classical heritage in this period.

Gathers path-breaking new work on the literary criticism of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Europe and Latin America, a domain of literary and intellectual history which represents one of the richest and most enduring strains of the classical heritage in this period.

Longinus’s On the Sublime is thought to have been ushered onto the English literary scene by Nicolas Boileau’s Traité du Sublime (1674). The search for antecedents to Boileau has yielded some scattered references in Rainolds, Chapman, Junius, Milton, and a few rhetorical textbooks, but nothing that seems to indicate a school of thought or even particular enthusiasm. The reception of Langbaine’s Latin translation of 1636 hardly predicts the vast literary influence the treatise would wield by the end of the century. A more promising readership may, however, be suggested by a string of citations in seventeenth-century sermons. In Longinus’s brief quotation from Genesis and praise of Moses’s oratory, clergymen found literary and rhetorical roots for their explorations of divine sublimity. Developing alongside Longinus’s reception in Christian rhetorics, these citations offer an alternative route for the early association of On the Sublime with Milton’s Christian epic, and its eventual entry into the literary mainstream.

Identifies twenty-two works owned and annotated by Roger Ascham, with an indicative digest of his notes in each.