Sicco Polenton, Lives of the Famous Latin Authors: A Selection

(Hardback)

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Offering an anthology of the first history of Latin literature, Sicco Polentons Scriptorum illustrium Latinae linguae libri XVIII is a collection of biographies that spans the period from ancient Rome to the 15th century. Compiled between 1419 and 1433, the main focus of the Scriptores illustres is on the life and works of ancient Latin authors, but Polenton also displays a wider interest in the history of Roman culture, institutions and society, which he constantly interlaces with literary issues.

This anthology offers the first English translation of carefully selected passages of the Scriptores illustres, in order to provide scholars and students with an accessible overview of the works structure and style, as well as its impact on early 15th-century scholarship. It is the first modern edition of Polentons work to be annotated, thereby providing an historical context for the work. The commentary sheds new light on the complexity of Polentons original research into his classical sources, and the anthology fills a gap in Anglophone scholarship, which has in recent decades paid little attention to Polention and his intellectual profile.

Reviews

This edition makes available a series of brief lives of selected ancient writers, alongside the biographers critical survey of literary, generic and historical issues. The Latin text is meticulously prepared, the English translation is excellent, and the Commentary identifies a wide range of literary sources. It should thus serve as a helpful resource to students and scholars of classical and neo-Latin literature. -- Estelle Haan, Emeritus Professor of English and Neo-Latin Studies, Queen's University Belfast, UK

Author Bio

T. E. Franklinos is a Supernumerary Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, and also holds an Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung fellowship at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitt, Germany. He has published on Latin poetry of the ancient and medieval worlds, and has co-edited major volumes on anonymous or pseudonymous poetic texts from antiquity, and on the thirteenth-century Codex Buranus.

Rino Modonutti is Associate Professor of Medieval Latin literature at the University of Padova, Italy. His main research interests lie in medieval historiography and encyclopedism, and in the tradition of classical Latin literature in the Late Middle Ages and in Italian humanism. He has published critical editions of Albertino Mussatos Ludovicus Bavarus (2015) and De gestis Italicorum post Henricum septimum Cesarem (2018).