Abstract:

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.