Böcker av Peter Mack

From his own middle age onwards, Virgil has been revered as perhaps the greatest poet of the Latin language. Moreover, no classical Latin author has a more continuous history of copying, study, and imitation than Virgil. He has been centrally important to the transmission of the classical tradition, and has played a unique role in European education. It was as a contribution to the richness of his reception that one of the first conferences in the joint Warburg Institute and Institute of Classical Studies series on the afterlife of the Classics was devoted to the afterlife of Virgil, on 8-9 May 2014.This volume publishes papers from that conference: they range in time from Petrarch to eighteenth-century Eastern Europe, focusing on three main areas: Italian Renaissance poetry, scholarship and visual art; English responses to Virgil's poetry; and, more unusually, emerging literatures in Eastern Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. [Within Virgil's work there is a strong focus on the ways in which later writers and artists have used the Eclogues and the Aeneid.]

Ovid was the most influential and widely imitated of all classical Latin poets. This volume publishes papers delivered at a conference on the Reception of Ovid in March 2013, jointly organised by the Institute of Classical Studies and the Warburg Institute, University of London. It presents studies of the impact of Ovid's work on Renaissance commentators, on neo-Latin poetry and epistolography, on Renaissance engravers, on poets like Dante, Mantuan, Pontano, Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, Lodge, Weever, Milton and Cowley and on artists including Correggio and Rubens. The main focus of the volume is inevitably the afterlife of the Metamorphoses but it also includes discussions of the impact of Heroides, Fasti, and Ibis, and publishes for the first time a Latin verse life of Ovid composed around 1460 by Bernardo Moretti. Contributors are Hélène Casanova-Robin, Frank T. Coulson, Fátima Diez-Plazas, Ingo Gildenhard, Philip Hardie, Maggie Kilgour, Gesine Manuwald, Elizabeth McGrath, John Miller, Victoria Moul, Caroline Stark, and Hérica Valladares.

Mack offers a wide-ranging exploration of the creative power of literary tradition, from the middle ages to the 21st century, revealing in new ways how it helps writers and readers make new works and meanings.

Shakespeare and Montaigne are the English and French writers of the sixteenth century who have the most to say to modern readers. This fascinating and rigorous book explores the relationship between the work of these great writers in the light of their rhetorical training.

This is the first comprehensive history of renaissance rhetoric, an advanced training in the use of language to argue, persuade, and convey information, which was an essential component of renaissance culture, and discusses rhetorical training as well as the opinions on rhetoric of major scholars including Erasmus, Melanchthon, and Sturm.

Peter Mack examines the impact of humanist training in rhetoric and argument on a range of Elizabethan prose texts, including political orations, histories, romances, conduct manuals, privy council debates and personal letters. Elizabethan Rhetoric reconstructs the knowledge, skills and approaches which an Elizabethan would have acquired in order to participate in the political and religious debates of the time: the approaches to an audience, analysis and replication of textual structures, organisation of arguments and tactics for disputation. Study of the rhetorical codes and conventions in terms of which debates were conducted is currently a major area of historical and literary enquiry, and Mack provides a wealth of new information about what was taught and how these conventions were exploited in personal memoranda, court depositions, sermons and political and religious pamphlets. This important book will be invaluable for all those interested in the culture, literature and political history of the period.