Maffeo Vegio (1407-1458) was the outstanding Latin poet of the first half of the fifteenth century. This volume includes Book XIII of Vergil's Aeneid, Vegio's famous continuation of the Roman epic, which was extremely popular in the later Renaissance, printed many times and translated into every major European language (and even into Scottish). It also contains three other epic works: Astyanax, based on an episode in the Iliad; The Golden Fleece (Vellus Aureum); and Antonias, a short epic based on the life of Saint Anthony of Egypt. Antonias is the first Christian epic of the Renaissance, a precursor of Milton's Paradise Lost. This volume contains the first modern editions of the Latin text of Antonias and Astyanax.
Maffeo Vegio (1407-1458) was the outstanding Latin poet of the first half of the fifteenth century. This volume includes Book XIII of Vergil's Aeneid, Vegio's famous continuation of the Roman epic, which was extremely popular in the later Renaissance, printed many times and translated into every major European language (and even into Scottish). It also contains three other epic works: Astyanax, based on an episode in the Iliad; The Golden Fleece (Vellus Aureum); and Antonias, a short epic based on the life of Saint Anthony of Egypt. Antonias is the first Christian epic of the Renaissance, a precursor of Milton's Paradise Lost. This volume contains the first modern editions of the Latin text of Antonias and Astyanax.
Michael C. J. Putnam is W. Duncan MacMillan II Professor of Classics Emeritus at Brown University. James Hankins is Professor of History at Harvard University and founder and General Editor of the I Tatti Renaissance Library. He is the author of Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy, winner of the Marraro Prize and a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year; Political Meritocracy in Renaissance Italy: The Virtuous Republic of Francesco Patrizi of Siena; and Plato in the Italian Renaissance; and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy. Widely regarded as one of the world’s leading authorities on Renaissance philosophy and political thought, he is a Corresponding Member of the British Academy.
Putnam's agile translation is a pleasure to read and a revelation
to study.
*Renaissance Quarterly*
I found Putnam's translation to be accurate and lively and Vegio to
be an exciting author with a clear Latin style. This book was truly
a delight to read...This well-executed edition will certainly help
scholars to form and offer interpretations to these and other
questions concerning the writings of Maffeo Vegio. Through making
Latin editions of these poems more widely available, this volume
will help inspire research on the rich but understudied Latin
poetry of the fifteenth century. Of equal importance, the lively
English translation will rightly make Vegio's poetry accessible to
a much larger audience.
*Sixteenth Century Journal*
By meticulous comparisons between Vegio's book 13, Vergil's books
1-12, and the work of Ovid, on which Vegio also drew, Putnam teases
out the ways in which Vegio transformed the mood of the work as a
whole--how he made Turnus, rather than Aeneas, the one who rages,
and managed to stage the hero's stellification, in Ovidian terms,
not as a Christian rebirth to salvation but as the proper reward
for a pagan's supremely virtuous life on earth. Vegio's scenes of
festival and feasting have a nice Virgilian feel to them, as Aeneas
and Latinus recall the struggles of the past in present
tranquility--as well as a vivid period sense of the ways in which
public ritual could seal and solidity a new community's
identity...Putnam teaches us to appreciate Vegio's artistry--and
his ability to reweave a troubling work of art until it clearly
embodied the best pagan, but not Christian, morality. In his own
way, Vegio glimpsed the incompleteness, the broken arch, that is a
prominent feature of the epic's architecture.
*New York Review of Books*
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