2025/04/18 by John Colley · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #Byzantine Studies and History #Renaissance Literature and Culture #Renaissance and Early Modern Studies
paper · doi:10.1093/9780198952565.001.0001
openalex publication_date 2025/04/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Abstract This monograph reassesses how the Quattrocento rebirth of Greek scholarship influenced fifteenth- and sixteenth-century English literature. It begins with the first signs of humanist Greek in England in and around Duke Humfrey’s circle, at a time when no English writer could claim significant Greek literacy. It ends on the cusp of Elizabethan literary culture, when English writers much more frequently translated Ancient Greek into both Latin and the vernacular. This period witnessed a surge in the translation of Greek. It also witnessed changing beliefs about how and why Greek should be translated at all, especially under the growing pressures of the Reformation. Building on scholarship in the fields of classical reception scholarship, translation studies, and intellectual history, this book argues that attending to the period’s ideas about Greek translation fundamentally alters our perception of Tudor humanism and the classical tradition more widely. In linking biblical and patristic translation with the translation of works by pagan authors, the book shows that Renaissance humanism was less secular and more wide-ranging in its goals and interest than the standard scholarly narrative has claimed. By showing continuities between late medieval and early modern literature, it further revises arguments for the novelty of the sixteenth-century humanists. The book ultimately argues that fifteenth- and sixteenth-century English writers experienced a contradictory relationship to Greek. Desire for the language and what it stood for was tempered by the realities of its mediated transmission. Desire for Greek was also undercut by the sectarian divisions that the language came to reflect and magnify.