Reading Horace in 1490S Padua: Willibald Pirckheimer, Joannes Calphurnius and Raphael Regius
Int class trad (2016) 23(2):85–107 DOI 10.1007/s12138-015-0386-y ARTICLE Reading Horace in 1490s Padua: Willibald Pirckheimer, Joannes Calphurnius and Raphael Regius Paul White1 Published online: 11 January 2016 © The Author(s) 2016. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Horace’s Epistle I.2, a poem about the benefits to be derived from reading Homer, was a key text for the grammarians and commentators of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, since it provided an ethical justification for the centrality of poetry to education.1 If medieval commentators were anxious about the use of pagan poetry in Christian education, they had only to emphasize the moral instruction it furnished by means of example and negative example. Discussions of intention and utility in the prologues habitually presented poetic texts as reprehending vice and commending virtuous conduct. In the Renaissance, such exemplary readings of poetic texts persisted, frequently identified with the aims and methods of epideictic, the rhetoric of praise and blame.2 Such readings were central to the way study of poetic texts was framed and justified in theory; practice was, perhaps, a different matter. Despite the claims made in prefaces and accessus that the study of poetry provided a solid moral education for the 1 Generally on this poem see: Catherine Keane, ‘Lessons in Reading: Horace on Homer at Epistles 1.2.1- 31’, Classical World, 104.4, 2011, pp. 427-50. 2 Suzanne Reynolds, Medieval Reading: Grammar, Rhetoric, and the Classical Text, Cambridge, 1996, pp. 14-15. See also my discussion of Badius Ascensius’s 1503 commentary on Epistles I.2, Jodocus Badius Ascensius: Commentary, Commerce and Print in the Renaissance, Oxford, 2013, pp.
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