"The author has written an extraordinary history of the meanings
and applications of a single word— pieta— and
its cultural and Roman antiquity, early Christian Europe, the European
middle ages, and sixteenth- and seventeenth -century Italy, France,
and England... This study is clearly a major contribution to comparative
literature."
— Paul J. Korshin, University of Pennsylvania
"This is a remarkably good book. Garrison has identified an enormous
topic never previously studied in a coherent way: the tradition
of ideas and terms for pietas in the pre-modern West... I
found his discussions not only of Renaissance commentary and mythography
but also of the medieval Investiture controversy original, lucid,
and compelling."
—Anthony Grafton, Princeton University
For centuries the most revered poem in the Western literary canon,
Vergil's Aeneid celebrates the Roman virtue of pietas.
In the preface to his English translation of the poem, John Dryden
attempts to explain all that this virtue includes: "Piery alone,"
he writes, "comprehends the whole Duty of Man towards the Gods,
towards his Country, and towards his Relations." Dryden's definition
belongs to a dialogue about meaning that reflects a history of contention
over religious, political, and moral issues of enduring cultural
significance, Because it is the site of antagonism between pagan
and Christian, republican and imperialist, emperor and pope, Protestant
and Catholic, pietas and its derivatives in the modern languages
bring to literary works multiple contexts of ideological dispute.
This book traces the history of the Vergilian ideal from classical
Latin to neoclassical English literature. In the process of, it
comparatively engages interpretation of a range of literary works
diversely responsive to the Aeneid: from the histories and
historical epics of the Silver Age, to the medieval mirrors for
magistrates, to Renaissance adaptations of Aeneid 4 and 12,
and finally to Dryden's complete translation.
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