Humanist Comedies

The five comedies included in this volume present a characteristic sampling of comic form as it was interpreted by some of the most important Latin humanists of the Quattrocento.

For about three thousand years comedy has applied a welcome humanist perspective to the world’s religious beliefs and practices. From the ancient Greek comedies of Aristophanes, the famous poem by Lucretius, and dialogues of Cicero to early modern and Enlightenment essays and philosophical texts, together with the inherent skepticism about life after death in tragicomedies by Plautus, Shakespeare, Molière, and nineteenth-century novels by such as Dickens and Hugo, the literary critic and historian Alexander Welsh analyzes the prevalence of openness of mind and relieving good humor in Western thought. The Humanist Comedy concludes with close examination of a postmodern novel by the Nobel Prize winner José Saramago.

This book contains a representative sampling of Latin drama written during the Tre- and Quattrocento. The five tragedies included in this volume were nourished by a potent amalgam of classical, medieval, and pre-humanist sources.

This wide-ranging collection, consisting of 50 essays by leading international scholars in a variety of fields, provides an overview of the reception history of a major literary genre from Greco-Roman antiquity to the present day. Section I considers how the 5th- and 4th-century Athenian comic poets defined themselves and their plays, especially in relation to other major literary forms. It then moves on to the Roman world and to the reception of Greek comedy there in art and literature. Section II deals with the European reception of Greek and Roman comedy in the Medieval, Renaissance, and Early Modern periods, and with the European stage tradition of comic theater more generally. Section III treats the handling of Greco-Roman comedy in the modern world, with attention not just to literary translations and stage-productions, but to more modern media such as radio and film. The collection will be of interest to students of ancient comedy as well as to all those concerned with how literary and theatrical traditions are passed on from one time and place to another, and adapted to meet local conditions and concerns.

Since its founding in 1943, Medievalia et Humanistica has won worldwide recognition as the first scholarly publication in America to devote itself entirely to medieval and Renaissance studies. Since 1970, a new series, sponsored by the Modern Language Association of America and edited by an international board of distinguished scholars and critics, has published interdisciplinary articles. In yearly hardbound volumes, the new series publishes significant scholarship, criticism, and reviews treating all facets of medieval and Renaissance culture: history, art, literature, music, science, law, economics, and philosophy.

The book aims at reframing the discussion on the "public sphere," usually understood as the place where the public opinion is formed, through rational discussion. The aim of this book is to give an account of this rationality, and its serious shortcomings, examining the role of the media and the confusing of public roles and personal identity. It focuses in particular on the role of the theatrical and comical in the historical development of the public sphere, and in this manner reformulating definitions of common sense, personal identity, and culture.

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Volume 48 presents the outcome of an international workshop (“Transnational Aspects of Early Modern Drama”) held at Ruhr-Universität Bochum in June 2021, hosted by Jan Bloemendal This volume contains six transnational and/or translingual case studies of early modern theatre and four reviews covering various epochs, genres and discourses.