Ja? Elsner - Jesús Hernández Lobato (edd.), The Poetics of Late Latin Literature. Oxford studies in late antiquity, New York: Oxford University Press, viii+534 pp. $85.00, ISBN 978-0-19-935563-1 (original) (raw)

The foundations of modern study of the writings of late antique Latin authors were laid between the early 1960s and late 1970s by continental European scholars, with only incidental contributions from their colleagues in the UK and USA, where the conservatism of most Classics departments and the relative weakness of Roman Catholicism in wider society ensured that Statius and the Younger Pliny remained the ne plus ultra of ancient Latin literature for all but a few daredevils. The first and still solitary volume in what should have been a four-volume summa of this main European scholarly tradition appeared in 1989 as Restauration und Erneuerung: Die lateinische Literatur von 284 bis 374 n. Chr (= Handbuch der lateinischen Literatur der Antike [HLL], Bd 5), edited by Reinhart Herzog with an expansive, critically nuanced, richly documented introduction (not referenced anywhere in the work under review). Despite the handbook format, collaborators on the HLL addressed a full range of critical issues, including questions of genre, style, poetics, transmission history, etc. In the same year, Michael Roberts' The Jeweled Style: Poetry and Poetics in Late Antiquity appeared like a bolt of lightning from the clear blue sky of Anglophone classical studies. Roberts explained that he followed Henri-Irénée Marrou, Jacques Fontaine and others in positing a 'common ground between Christian and pagan authors' in respect of 'aesthetic, and particularly stylistic, preferences'. He went on: 'More questionable is the supposition that there is a single aesthetic that is characteristic of late antiquity… but at least in poetry, it seems to me, it makes sense to talk of stylistic features that are typical of the period' (6). His modest claim-citing Arnold Hauser, Mannerism-for what art historians used to call 'period style' was supported by the literary-and art-historical evidence lucidly set out in his book, which is still the best introduction in English to late antique Latin poetry and, for the methodological framing of its subject, had no serious company in that language until the appearance of Aaron Pelttari's The Space that Remains: Reading Latin Poetry in Late Antiquity (2014). Since 1989, and especially over the last two decades, new fashions in classical literary studies-reception, intertextuality-have combined with the curricularization of Late Antiquity to encourage Latinists throughout an ever-widening Anglosphere to reinvest in the more classically inviting of Greek and Latin writers from later periods of the Roman Empire. The