Winner of the 2015 Jozef IJsewijn Prize for best first book on a Neo-Latin topic
Early modern commentaries on Statiusâ Thebaid have been little studied; even that by Barth (1664-5), which holds a conspicuous place among them, has only been taken into account now and then, and often in a rather superficial way. The present book, which makes use of unpublished archival material, offers a comprehensive overview of these works (contexts, contents, interconnections). It is particularly interested in 16th-17th commentators and strives to give Barthâs achievement the attention it deserves. By closely looking at the various ways in which the commentaries respond to Statiusâ poem, but also at the various kinds of discourse they present, it casts a new light on the reception of the Thebaid and on the early modern practice of commentary-writing.
All those interested in the commentary format, reception of classical texts, history of classical scholarship, intellectual history, history of the book, Flavian epic ; classical philologists, neo-latin philologists.