Reception
Authors: Paul Joanna 
Published: September 2014

A recent special issue of the Classical Receptions Journal marked the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Charles Martindale's Redeeming the Text. Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception. Although the rich and various examples of classical reception scholarship that have appeared over the past two decades are by no means all cut from Martindale's cloth, the ‘seminal’ and ‘influential’ nature of his study is surely not in doubt. It is fitting, then, that this issue's round-up of reception publications focuses on a small cluster of recent studies that, like Redeeming the Text, explore the complex reception histories of Latin literature, and do so with a keen eye to the theoretical underpinnings of such scholarship; fitting, too, that our first title, Romans and Romantics, features Charles Martindale among its editors. The eighteen essays in this collection in fact range well beyond literature, with visual culture and the physical fabric of the city of Rome playing an important role; but encounters with Latin texts are a central component of the book, and the overarching theoretical and methodological framework for examining them bears the clear imprint of Martindale's reception manifesto. The introduction emphasizes the importance of remaining alert to the two-way dynamics of reception: not only do the contributors explore the ways in which Romanticism was shaped by antiquity, but they also examine the impact that Romanticism has had on subsequent views of antiquity. Although the idea of reception as a two-way process is often parroted, its implications are not always interrogated and explained so carefully as they are here. Most valuably, Romans and Romantics acknowledges and confronts the overly simple ‘myths’ that attach to our ideas of both the classical and the Romantic, showing how notions of what Romanticism ‘is’ are just as contingent and subject to distortion as those of the classical. So, for example, Timothy Saunders' fascinating chapter on ‘Originality’ successfully challenges the assumption that Romanticism was in some way antithetical or inimical to Roman studies, and that it was responsible for the lasting negative impression of Latin (literary) culture as imitative and inferior. Instead, he argues, ‘Romantic notions of originality’ (85) were more complex than we might assume, and could certainly find space for recognizing and celebrating Rome's creative use of its Greek heritage. Other chapters offer useful studies of the ‘varied, vital, and mutually sustaining’ (v) interactions between Romantics and Romans, including accessible accounts of key authors such as Shelley, Byron, and de Staël. Particularly worthwhile, though, is the final section, ‘Receptions’. By focusing on post-Romantic material, it lays bare our own modern preconceptions of the Romantic movement and encourages contemplation of how receptions of Romanticism are as important as receptions of Rome. Ralph Pite's excellent chapter on Thomas Hardy, for example, shows how this author, and many of his late nineteenth-century contemporaries, might be disappointed by visiting Rome: their expectations of the city, shaped by their own Romantic inheritance, could be undermined by the revelation of the modernized capital of a newly unified Italy, ‘threaten[ing] the post-Romantic traveller's cherished idea of ‘an eternal city frozen in time’’ (328).