Bryan Brazeau | University of Warwick (original) (raw)

Articles by Bryan Brazeau

The Italianist, 2019

In an infamous 1926 article in La révolution Surréaliste, André Breton roundly condemned Giorgio ... more In an infamous 1926 article in La révolution Surréaliste, André Breton roundly condemned Giorgio de Chirico, faintly praising his early ‘metaphysical’ works, yet rejecting the artist’s later production. This judgment has had a marked impact on criticism, which often separates the artist’s work into his early ‘metaphysical’ period and his production after 1919, when he proclaimed himself a Pictor classicus advocating a ‘return to the craft’ that focused on painting as a technical skill and the copying of renaissance masters. Building on work of recent scholars, this essay investigates De Chirico’s relationship to renaissance painting, arguing that his interest in early modern Italian masters predates his 1919 break with the avant-garde. Through an examination of De Chirico’s writings and early metaphysical canvases, the artist’s interest in renaissance paintings is shown to be a constant thread throughout his early career, rather than a reactionary rejection of contemporary artistic currents.

**Due to image licensing restrictions I am unable to upload a PDF to Academia.edu. If you would like a copy of the article and do not have access to the journal please contact me directly for a link to an ePrint***

Renaissance and Reformation, 2018

This article considers the ways in which Aristotle’s notion of hamartia (ἁμαρτία) in the Poetics—... more This article considers the ways in which Aristotle’s notion of hamartia (ἁμαρτία) in the Poetics— the tragic fault that leads to the protagonist’s downfall— was rendered in sixteenth-century translations and commentaries produced in Italy. While early Latin translations and commentaries initially translated the term as error, mid-cinquecento literary critics and theorists frequently used a term that implied sin: peccatum/peccato. Was this linguistic choice among sixteenth-century translators indicative of a broader attempt to Christianize the Poetics? While there were significant attempts on the part of translators and commentators to moralize the Poetics, this study of how hamartia was translated suggests that such interpretations were not Counter-Reformation distortions of Aristole’s Poetics but rather part of a broader program of cultural translation, domesticating the Greek philosopher for an early modern Christian audience.

Sir John Harington’s 1591 translation of ‘Ludovico’ Ariosto’s OrlandoFurioso has been much malign... more Sir John Harington’s 1591 translation of ‘Ludovico’ Ariosto’s OrlandoFurioso has been much maligned for its free translation, digressive notes, and the translator’s obtrusive presence. This essay addresses the question of Harington’s accommodation of his audience using Paul Ricoeur’s notion of ‘linguistic hospitality’ to consider how Harington invites English readers to engage with the Italian poem. Harington’s exegetical notes and paratextual aids serve as a privileged site or ‘third
text’ between the source and target texts to adapt Ariosto for English readers. The translator’s anglicising strategies are grounded in contemporary Elizabethan reading practices, while also emulating the exegetical apparatus that accompanied the Italian reception of Ariosto’s poem. Domestication strategies Harington employs include the anticipation of his audience’s cultural biases, an emphasis on historical events of interest to English readers, and the inclusion of personal details that create cultural bridges between the reader, the translator, and the Italian author.

Book Chapters by Bryan Brazeau

Dante and Heterodoxy: The Temptation of Radical Thought in the 13th century, ed. Maria Luisa Ardizzone.

In his commentary on the Divine Comedy, Benvenuto da Imola cites the beginning of what Ferdinand ... more In his commentary on the Divine Comedy, Benvenuto da Imola cites the beginning of what Ferdinand Van Steenberghen assumes to have been a well-known-if erroneously attributed-legend: one night, a terrified Siger of Brabant dreams that he sees the ghost of a recently-dead student covered with burning parchments inscribed with the sophisms he had once taught him. A drop of this student's sweat falls on Siger's hand and pierces right through: from that day forward, Siger abandons sophistry and gives himself entirely to theology. 1 Other than being every professor's worst nightmare, this legend helps illustrate two trends in thinking about Siger of Brabant. The first of these is the tendency to romanticize and exaggerate the figure of Siger as a heretical thinker who suddenly converts to an orthodox Christian position. 2 This legend also helps illustrates how Siger has often been identified as a sophist or as a logician. Indeed, Giuseppe 1 V.

Book Reviews by Bryan Brazeau

Published in Quaderni d'Italianistica vol. 37.2 (2016) [2018]

Year's Work in Modern Language Studies, Vol. 75 (Survey Years 2012-2013): 307-318, Feb 2015

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Digital Publications by Bryan Brazeau

A podcast from the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at the University of Warwick (UK). Pro... more A podcast from the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at the University of Warwick (UK). Produced, recorded, and edited by Bryan Brazeau.

This podcast explores the vernacular reception of Aristotle and his works in Renaissance Italy as... more This podcast explores the vernacular reception of Aristotle and his works in Renaissance Italy as part of the ERC-Funded Vernacular Aristotelianism project (PI: Marco Sgarbi) at the University of Warwick (UK), and at the University of Ca' Foscari in Venice (Italy). The podcast is produced, recorded, edited, and hosted by Dr. Bryan Brazeau, a member of the project at the University of Warwick. For more on the project and the podcast: http://www.tiny.cc/ercaristotle

Encyclopedia and Catalog Entries by Bryan Brazeau

In Venezia e Aristotele (ca. 1454-1600) Greco, Latino e Italiano, ed. Alessio Cotugno and David A... more In Venezia e Aristotele (ca. 1454-1600) Greco, Latino e Italiano, ed. Alessio Cotugno and David A. Lines. Venice: Marcianum Press, 2016: 102-3, 116-117.

Forthcoming Publications by Bryan Brazeau

***Under Contract with Bloomsbury as part of Bloomsbury Studies in the Aristotelian Tradition - A... more ***Under Contract with Bloomsbury as part of Bloomsbury Studies in the Aristotelian Tradition - Anticipated 2019***

This collection uses new and cutting-edge perspectives to explore literary criticism and the reception of Aristotle's Poetics in early modern Italy. The essays, contributed by leading scholars on both sides of the Atlantic, map the current field and set out new directions for future study.

A crucial feature of intellectual culture in Renaissance Italy was the reception of classical texts of literary criticism, such as Horace’s Ars Poetica, Longinus's On the Sublime, and most importantly, Aristotle’s Poetics. These works also provided poets with inspiration to write their own poetic theory. Such translations, commentaries, lectures, and polemic treatises established the terms of reference for literary criticism across seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe. Yet, many remain largely unexplored by scholars writing in English today. Indeed, the reference work in the field continues to be Bernard Weinberg's classic study A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance (1961).

These essays revisit such texts through new interdisciplinary methodological lenses including book history, translation studies, history of the emotions, classical reception, and reconstructed reading practices. For the first time, several early modern Italian poetic texts are also placed in productive dialogue with twentieth-century literary theory. This volume will become a new reference for the field, modelling contemporary practice and mapping out avenues for future study both in its rich essays and in the two appendices: a bibliography of Weinberg's bequest to the Newberry Library and the University of Chicago and a critical bibliography of scholarship on early modern Italian literary criticism from 1961 to today.

***In "Acquisition Through Translation: The Rise of European Vernaculars," Eds. Alessandra Petrin... more ***In "Acquisition Through Translation: The Rise of European Vernaculars," Eds. Alessandra Petrina and Federica Masiero. Palgrave. Forthcoming, 2019.***

In his 1570 Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizzata e sposta, Lodovico Castelvetro transforms Aristotle’s description of a man preeminent in virtue and justice into a ‘persona santissima,’ and creates an equivalence between the Aristotelian notion of hamartia (ἀμαρτία), the error which precipitates a character’s tragic downfall and the Christian concept of sin. The early modern Latin and vernacular reception of the Poetics occurred at a moment of pivotal religious change in Italy. Castelvetro’s use of the term ‘peccato,’ then, suggests that the religious culture of the period may have exerted an influence on critical approaches to hamartia in contemporary translations, commentaries, and discussions concerning the Poetics.
This paper considers the multiple ways in which Aristotle’s notion of hamartia (ἁμαρτία) in the Poetics was rendered in sixteenth-century translations and commentaries, using evidence from unpublished manuscripts produced in mid-sixteenth-century Florence and Padua. While early modern Latin translations and commentaries defined the term as a simple ‘error’ on the part of the tragic protagonist, it quickly came to be translated by certain early modern theorists not simply as ‘error/errore’ but also as ‘peccatum/peccato.’ Yet, Florentine intellectuals resisted a religious interpretation of this term, remaining focused on the poetic efficacy of hamartia, while those in Padua interpreted the term through the lens of Aristotelian moral philosophy. The article thus suggests that vertical translation not only implicates the target language, but also the immediate cultural and intellectual contexts of translators and their readers.

Under Review

As A. Bartlett Giammatti noted in 1966, most earthly paradises in Renaissance Epic are often foun... more As A. Bartlett Giammatti noted in 1966, most earthly paradises in Renaissance Epic are often found wanting by some higher standard; they are often dangerous imitations of Eden as represented in Dante’s Divine Comedy. This essay re-evaluates Giamatti’s analysis of paradise spaces and pastoral interludes in Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata from the perspectives of human geography and ecocriticism. It considers how these spaces are informed by the broader epic geographies of the works that contain them and asks what their deceptive designs might tell us about their authors’ and the genre’s underlying ecological values.

***In Approaches to Teaching Ariosto and the Italian Romance Epic, ed. by Jo Ann Cavallo. Modern ... more ***In Approaches to Teaching Ariosto and the Italian Romance Epic, ed. by Jo Ann Cavallo. Modern Language Association of America. Forthcoming, 2019.***

As A. Bartlett Giamatti has noted in his excellent study The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic, the enchanted paradises of early modern chivalric epic are distinguished from their medieval counterparts by their illusory, enchanted nature. While Dante was concerned with the location of the “historical” Eden, later poets such as Boiardo, Ariosto and Tasso wrote of loci amoeni that only appeared to be what Eden once was.

This essay examines the earthly paradise topos in Renaissance chivalric epic and proposes how it may be used to structure an upper-level undergraduate seminar course on chivalric epic in either an Italian or Comparative literature department. I provide a useful thematic approach to teaching these expansive texts via key excerpts, relying on Giamatti’s claim that the earthly paradise topos functions as a central organ of these poems. As such, these episodes represent in miniature many of the tensions and ambiguities that undergird these poems as a whole. It is hoped that such a pedagogical approach will not only allow students to engage with these texts, but also to reflect on the ideological tensions and propaedeutic possibilities that underlie contemporary enchanted loci amoeni, from weekend music festivals to vacations at beachfront resorts.

Though the focus is primarily on Italian texts, (Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso) I will also suggest texts from other European traditions (Spenser and Cervantes) that might be brought in for fruitful comparison. Texts may be taught in their original language or in translation. To outline the pedagogy of such a course, the essay will be divided into six “units”, each focused on a particular text, describing how the text might be presented and possible assignments for the students to complete. I will also discuss optional workshops that can be worked into the course to help students who are approaching the text in the original language, possibilities for final evaluations, relevant critical theory that might be worked in depending on the level of the students and useful digital resources.

The Italianist, 2019

In an infamous 1926 article in La révolution Surréaliste, André Breton roundly condemned Giorgio ... more In an infamous 1926 article in La révolution Surréaliste, André Breton roundly condemned Giorgio de Chirico, faintly praising his early ‘metaphysical’ works, yet rejecting the artist’s later production. This judgment has had a marked impact on criticism, which often separates the artist’s work into his early ‘metaphysical’ period and his production after 1919, when he proclaimed himself a Pictor classicus advocating a ‘return to the craft’ that focused on painting as a technical skill and the copying of renaissance masters. Building on work of recent scholars, this essay investigates De Chirico’s relationship to renaissance painting, arguing that his interest in early modern Italian masters predates his 1919 break with the avant-garde. Through an examination of De Chirico’s writings and early metaphysical canvases, the artist’s interest in renaissance paintings is shown to be a constant thread throughout his early career, rather than a reactionary rejection of contemporary artistic currents.

**Due to image licensing restrictions I am unable to upload a PDF to Academia.edu. If you would like a copy of the article and do not have access to the journal please contact me directly for a link to an ePrint***

Renaissance and Reformation, 2018

This article considers the ways in which Aristotle’s notion of hamartia (ἁμαρτία) in the Poetics—... more This article considers the ways in which Aristotle’s notion of hamartia (ἁμαρτία) in the Poetics— the tragic fault that leads to the protagonist’s downfall— was rendered in sixteenth-century translations and commentaries produced in Italy. While early Latin translations and commentaries initially translated the term as error, mid-cinquecento literary critics and theorists frequently used a term that implied sin: peccatum/peccato. Was this linguistic choice among sixteenth-century translators indicative of a broader attempt to Christianize the Poetics? While there were significant attempts on the part of translators and commentators to moralize the Poetics, this study of how hamartia was translated suggests that such interpretations were not Counter-Reformation distortions of Aristole’s Poetics but rather part of a broader program of cultural translation, domesticating the Greek philosopher for an early modern Christian audience.

Sir John Harington’s 1591 translation of ‘Ludovico’ Ariosto’s OrlandoFurioso has been much malign... more Sir John Harington’s 1591 translation of ‘Ludovico’ Ariosto’s OrlandoFurioso has been much maligned for its free translation, digressive notes, and the translator’s obtrusive presence. This essay addresses the question of Harington’s accommodation of his audience using Paul Ricoeur’s notion of ‘linguistic hospitality’ to consider how Harington invites English readers to engage with the Italian poem. Harington’s exegetical notes and paratextual aids serve as a privileged site or ‘third
text’ between the source and target texts to adapt Ariosto for English readers. The translator’s anglicising strategies are grounded in contemporary Elizabethan reading practices, while also emulating the exegetical apparatus that accompanied the Italian reception of Ariosto’s poem. Domestication strategies Harington employs include the anticipation of his audience’s cultural biases, an emphasis on historical events of interest to English readers, and the inclusion of personal details that create cultural bridges between the reader, the translator, and the Italian author.

Dante and Heterodoxy: The Temptation of Radical Thought in the 13th century, ed. Maria Luisa Ardizzone.

In his commentary on the Divine Comedy, Benvenuto da Imola cites the beginning of what Ferdinand ... more In his commentary on the Divine Comedy, Benvenuto da Imola cites the beginning of what Ferdinand Van Steenberghen assumes to have been a well-known-if erroneously attributed-legend: one night, a terrified Siger of Brabant dreams that he sees the ghost of a recently-dead student covered with burning parchments inscribed with the sophisms he had once taught him. A drop of this student's sweat falls on Siger's hand and pierces right through: from that day forward, Siger abandons sophistry and gives himself entirely to theology. 1 Other than being every professor's worst nightmare, this legend helps illustrate two trends in thinking about Siger of Brabant. The first of these is the tendency to romanticize and exaggerate the figure of Siger as a heretical thinker who suddenly converts to an orthodox Christian position. 2 This legend also helps illustrates how Siger has often been identified as a sophist or as a logician. Indeed, Giuseppe 1 V.

Published in Quaderni d'Italianistica vol. 37.2 (2016) [2018]

Year's Work in Modern Language Studies, Vol. 75 (Survey Years 2012-2013): 307-318, Feb 2015

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

A podcast from the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at the University of Warwick (UK). Pro... more A podcast from the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at the University of Warwick (UK). Produced, recorded, and edited by Bryan Brazeau.

This podcast explores the vernacular reception of Aristotle and his works in Renaissance Italy as... more This podcast explores the vernacular reception of Aristotle and his works in Renaissance Italy as part of the ERC-Funded Vernacular Aristotelianism project (PI: Marco Sgarbi) at the University of Warwick (UK), and at the University of Ca' Foscari in Venice (Italy). The podcast is produced, recorded, edited, and hosted by Dr. Bryan Brazeau, a member of the project at the University of Warwick. For more on the project and the podcast: http://www.tiny.cc/ercaristotle

***Under Contract with Bloomsbury as part of Bloomsbury Studies in the Aristotelian Tradition - A... more ***Under Contract with Bloomsbury as part of Bloomsbury Studies in the Aristotelian Tradition - Anticipated 2019***

This collection uses new and cutting-edge perspectives to explore literary criticism and the reception of Aristotle's Poetics in early modern Italy. The essays, contributed by leading scholars on both sides of the Atlantic, map the current field and set out new directions for future study.

A crucial feature of intellectual culture in Renaissance Italy was the reception of classical texts of literary criticism, such as Horace’s Ars Poetica, Longinus's On the Sublime, and most importantly, Aristotle’s Poetics. These works also provided poets with inspiration to write their own poetic theory. Such translations, commentaries, lectures, and polemic treatises established the terms of reference for literary criticism across seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe. Yet, many remain largely unexplored by scholars writing in English today. Indeed, the reference work in the field continues to be Bernard Weinberg's classic study A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance (1961).

These essays revisit such texts through new interdisciplinary methodological lenses including book history, translation studies, history of the emotions, classical reception, and reconstructed reading practices. For the first time, several early modern Italian poetic texts are also placed in productive dialogue with twentieth-century literary theory. This volume will become a new reference for the field, modelling contemporary practice and mapping out avenues for future study both in its rich essays and in the two appendices: a bibliography of Weinberg's bequest to the Newberry Library and the University of Chicago and a critical bibliography of scholarship on early modern Italian literary criticism from 1961 to today.

***In "Acquisition Through Translation: The Rise of European Vernaculars," Eds. Alessandra Petrin... more ***In "Acquisition Through Translation: The Rise of European Vernaculars," Eds. Alessandra Petrina and Federica Masiero. Palgrave. Forthcoming, 2019.***

In his 1570 Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizzata e sposta, Lodovico Castelvetro transforms Aristotle’s description of a man preeminent in virtue and justice into a ‘persona santissima,’ and creates an equivalence between the Aristotelian notion of hamartia (ἀμαρτία), the error which precipitates a character’s tragic downfall and the Christian concept of sin. The early modern Latin and vernacular reception of the Poetics occurred at a moment of pivotal religious change in Italy. Castelvetro’s use of the term ‘peccato,’ then, suggests that the religious culture of the period may have exerted an influence on critical approaches to hamartia in contemporary translations, commentaries, and discussions concerning the Poetics.
This paper considers the multiple ways in which Aristotle’s notion of hamartia (ἁμαρτία) in the Poetics was rendered in sixteenth-century translations and commentaries, using evidence from unpublished manuscripts produced in mid-sixteenth-century Florence and Padua. While early modern Latin translations and commentaries defined the term as a simple ‘error’ on the part of the tragic protagonist, it quickly came to be translated by certain early modern theorists not simply as ‘error/errore’ but also as ‘peccatum/peccato.’ Yet, Florentine intellectuals resisted a religious interpretation of this term, remaining focused on the poetic efficacy of hamartia, while those in Padua interpreted the term through the lens of Aristotelian moral philosophy. The article thus suggests that vertical translation not only implicates the target language, but also the immediate cultural and intellectual contexts of translators and their readers.

Under Review

As A. Bartlett Giammatti noted in 1966, most earthly paradises in Renaissance Epic are often foun... more As A. Bartlett Giammatti noted in 1966, most earthly paradises in Renaissance Epic are often found wanting by some higher standard; they are often dangerous imitations of Eden as represented in Dante’s Divine Comedy. This essay re-evaluates Giamatti’s analysis of paradise spaces and pastoral interludes in Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata from the perspectives of human geography and ecocriticism. It considers how these spaces are informed by the broader epic geographies of the works that contain them and asks what their deceptive designs might tell us about their authors’ and the genre’s underlying ecological values.

***In Approaches to Teaching Ariosto and the Italian Romance Epic, ed. by Jo Ann Cavallo. Modern ... more ***In Approaches to Teaching Ariosto and the Italian Romance Epic, ed. by Jo Ann Cavallo. Modern Language Association of America. Forthcoming, 2019.***

As A. Bartlett Giamatti has noted in his excellent study The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic, the enchanted paradises of early modern chivalric epic are distinguished from their medieval counterparts by their illusory, enchanted nature. While Dante was concerned with the location of the “historical” Eden, later poets such as Boiardo, Ariosto and Tasso wrote of loci amoeni that only appeared to be what Eden once was.

This essay examines the earthly paradise topos in Renaissance chivalric epic and proposes how it may be used to structure an upper-level undergraduate seminar course on chivalric epic in either an Italian or Comparative literature department. I provide a useful thematic approach to teaching these expansive texts via key excerpts, relying on Giamatti’s claim that the earthly paradise topos functions as a central organ of these poems. As such, these episodes represent in miniature many of the tensions and ambiguities that undergird these poems as a whole. It is hoped that such a pedagogical approach will not only allow students to engage with these texts, but also to reflect on the ideological tensions and propaedeutic possibilities that underlie contemporary enchanted loci amoeni, from weekend music festivals to vacations at beachfront resorts.

Though the focus is primarily on Italian texts, (Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso) I will also suggest texts from other European traditions (Spenser and Cervantes) that might be brought in for fruitful comparison. Texts may be taught in their original language or in translation. To outline the pedagogy of such a course, the essay will be divided into six “units”, each focused on a particular text, describing how the text might be presented and possible assignments for the students to complete. I will also discuss optional workshops that can be worked into the course to help students who are approaching the text in the original language, possibilities for final evaluations, relevant critical theory that might be worked in depending on the level of the students and useful digital resources.

POETICS BEFORE MODERNITY invites papers on POETICS AMONG THE DISCIPLINES to be proposed for SCI... more POETICS BEFORE MODERNITY
invites papers on

POETICS AMONG THE DISCIPLINES
to be proposed for

SCIENTIAE, AMSTERDAM 3-6 JUNE 2020

Gathering scholars working on all aspects of c.1400–1700 intellectual history, the Scientiae conference is the ideal venue for a conversation about where knowledge about imaginative literature fits into the period’s disciplinary map, and how the key developments in the sphere of poetics and literary criticism in this period relate to those in other fields and disciplines—alchemy, astrology, epistemology, magic, medicine, natural history and philosophy, the subjects of the trivium and the quadrivium, theology and biblical exegesis, and the visual, plastic, and performative arts, among others. We invite papers which shed new light on any aspect of this relationship, including, but not limited to:

​- the influence of other fields and disciplines on c.1400–1700 poetic theory, and vice versa

- the changing place of poetry and poetics in the disciplinary map

- authors who produced important work in poetics and literary criticism as well as other fields—e.g., Scaliger, Melanchthon, Vettori, Camerarius, Patrizi, Tasso, Bacon, Galileo, Marinella, Vossius, Hobbes, Digby, Cavendish—and the connections between these aspects of their work

- the perceived place of poetic knowledge within the Aristotelian system

- the impact of poetic theory on the development of the non-literary—visual, plastic, performative, musical—arts, and vice versa

- the relationship between poetics and the Reformation/Counter-Reformation

- theories of mimesis within poetics and without

- theories of allegory within poetics and without

- poetics and translation theory

- practical criticism as a form of knowledge

Please send 250-word abstracts for 20-minute papers, accompanied by a 100-word biographical note, to poeticsbeforemodernity@gmail.com by 7 January 2020. A selection of abstracts will be arranged into panels and submitted for consideration by the Scientiae 2020 conference committee. Organizers for Poetics before Modernity: Bryan Brazeau (b.brazeau@warwick.ac.uk), Vladimir Brljak (vladimir.brljak@durham.ac.uk), Micha Lazarus (mdsl3@cam.ac.uk).

​Further information is available at:
Scientiae: Disciplines of Knowing in the Early Modern World
Scientiae 2020 Call for Papers