EMERG Reading Group: Renaissance Epic

LO I the man, whose Muse whilome did maske,
As time her taught, in lowly Shepheards weeds,
Am now enforst a far vnfitter taske,
For trumpets sterne to chaunge mine Oaten reeds,
And sing of Knights and Ladies gentle deeds

                                                            Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1590; 1596)

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England have a special relationship with epic. Aside from Shakespeare, the period’s two best-known writers remain Edmund Spenser and John Milton — the authors of the first, major English epics. Yet the period as a whole, in England and further afield, repeatedly returns to epic poetry as fertile ground for literary experimentation, poetic theorising, and political allegory.

The sixteenth century sees widespread attempts to Christianise epic, from Vida’s Latin Christiad (1535) to Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas’s Semaines (1578; 1584) in French, as well as experimentation with new, prose versions of epic romance, following the rediscovery of Heliodorus’s Aethiopika in 1526. New, Italian romances by Ariosto and Tasso exert considerable influence across the continent, and spark lively critical debates over the form and content appropriate to epic poetry, while national epics like as Camões’s Lusiads (1572) and Ronsard’s Franciade (1572) offer a classicised view on emergent projects of national expansion and colonialism.

With an eye to parallel developments in other European languages and cultures, as well as to the wider Renaissance world, this meeting of the Early Modern English Reading Group seeks to survey the diverse and experimental forms which epic poetry written in English comprised in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the critical debates which these formal innovations inspired. Authors discussed will include Spenser, Milton, Jonson, Davenant, and others, and attention will also be given to the extraordinary body of translation produced by writers including Henry Howard and Richard Stanyhurst.

This event will run via Zoom - the link will be sent out via the EMERG mailing list.

For more information, and to be added to EMERG’s mailing list, please contact Fraser McIlwraith (fraser.mcilwraith.15@ucl.ac.uk) and Kate Kinley (catherine.kinley.19@ucl.ac.uk). We are keen to accept submissions in advance in advance of our meetings, so if you would like to recommend an extract from a Renaissance text, please contact us!