Tacitus Incognito: Opera as History in "L'incoronazione di Poppea"

1999 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wendy Heller
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Moral Thought ◽  
Sexually Explicit ◽  
History Of ◽  
Stoic Philosophy ◽  
Artistic Self ◽  
The Erotic

This essay considers opera's use of a particular history in seventeenth-century Venice: Cornelius Tacitus's Annals of the Roman Empire as transformed in Monteverdi's and Busenello's L'incoronazione di Poppea. In contrast with a recent hypothesis linking Tacitus, Poppea, and the Venetian Accademia degli Incogniti with Neostoicism, this essay argues that the members of the Accademia degli Incogniti used Tacitus's history of the Julio-Claudians as part of a highly specialized republican discourse on Venetian political superiority and sensual pleasures. After considering Incogniti philosophies and interest in the erotic in the context of Venetian political ideals and the influence of Tacitus on political and moral thought in early modern Europe, this essay places L'incoronazione di Poppea in the context of several other treatments of Tacitus produced during the mid-seventeenth century by Busenello's colleagues in the Accademia degli Incogniti, in which empire and the liabilities of female power are contrasted implicitly with Venice's male oligarchy. The Venetian rejection of Stoic philosophy and fascination with the erotic and the patriotic play themselves out in one of the opera's most peculiar distortions of the historical record-the scene following the death of Seneca in which the philosopher's nephew, the poet Marcus Annaeus Lucanus, known in Venice for his republican ideals, joins the emperor Nero in song to celebrate his uncle's death and Poppea's charms. As transformed by Monteverdi's sexually explicit music, Lucan's endorsement of artistic self-expression, sensual freedom, and republican ideals provides a critical counterpoint to Senecan support of the principate and moral restraint-a view that was far more compatible with Venetian concerns at midcentury.

The Desperation of Deianira: Heroides 9 and Early Modern Translation

2013 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Rowland
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Female Literacy

This essay charts the ways in which the story of Hercules and his wife/killer Deianira was received in early modern Europe. In particular, it traces the reception history of the ninth of Ovid's Heroides, in which Deianira writes a letter of complaint, about her husband's sexual violence, and her disastrous attempt to reclaim his affections. Responses to Ovid's poem ranged from outrage – male poets angrily refuted Deianira's accusations – to vernacular translations that, in the hands of the Tudor writer George Turberville, sympathetically conveyed the anguish of the abused wife, but in the hands of Turberville's seventeenth-century successors, muted or silenced Deianira's complaints. The essay locates this reception history in the context of debates about domesticity, sexual (mis)conduct, and female literacy.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corey Tazzara
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Stability ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
History Of Economic Thought ◽  
Commodity Market ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Scientific Communities ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

Tuscany of the mid-seventeenth century was renowned for its luxury crafts and had one of the most vibrant scientific communities in Europe. The Medici family presided over a state whose political stability astonished contemporaries, in which wise rule and good fortune had spared their subjects the worst ravages associated with the Thirty Years' War. The city of Livorno was the Medici state’s greatest prize and the most innovative port in Italy. The introduction examines the development of Livorno and other free ports in three registers: as part of the Italian response to the rise of the Atlantic world; as implicated in the creation of a new kind of commodity market; and as a neglected problem in the history of economic thought. It suggests that free ports should be central to our interpretation of economic change in early modern Europe and the Mediterranean.

‘A colony so fertile’

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Hingley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Public Buildings ◽  
Roman Britain ◽  
The Public ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Published Evidence ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Military

In A Specimen of a History of Oxfordshire, the Reverend Thomas Warton reflected on the significance of the Roman pavement at Stonesfield (Oxfordshire) and explored the two main themes which structure chapters three and four: he writes of Roman settlers who migrated with their families to Britain but suggests that wealthy and well-connected Britons might have built villas like the example uncovered at Stonesfield. From the late seventeenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, the debate about the nature of society in Roman Britain drew upon these contrasting images to explain the character of the Roman occupation of southern Britain. Certain writings of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries had developed the idea of the passing on of civility from the Romans to the British, which could be used as a source of patriotic reflection. There was less confidence in this idea during the eighteenth century, when influential works on the Walls and the northern stations promoted a primarily military interpretation of Roman sites in the south. In the introduction to his volume of 1793, Roy presented a thoughtful assessment of contemporary understanding of Roman Britain and emphasized its military nature. Following earlier examples, he divided the monuments of the Roman empire into two types: the public buildings—the temples, amphitheatres, and baths well known to British gentlemen from their visits to Italy—and the military sites. Roy emphasized that, with regard to military remains of Britain ‘perhaps no quarter of their vast empire, not even Italy itself, furnishes so great a variety; and many of them exceedingly perfect’. By contrast, in reflecting on public buildings, he states that ‘Britain affords very few vestiges of any consequence’. Indeed, it is true that, by the late eighteenth century, there was very little published evidence for public buildings to compare with the extensive evidence for the military sites of southern Scotland and northern England. Roy argued, ‘neither is it probable that the Romans ever executed many of those costly edifices in this island’. At the time Roy was writing (c.1773), little excavated evidence had been found for public buildings or ornate architecture anywhere in Britain.

Refiguring Baidehīśa Bilāsa: Reading the Queer and the Erotic in Upendra Bhanja’s Rāmāyaṇa

2020 ◽  
Vol 88 (2) ◽  
pp. 569-593
Author(s):  
Ujaan Ghosh ◽  
Amrita Chowdhury
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Public Memory ◽  
The Political ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Right ◽  
Scholarly Attention ◽  
The Erotic

Abstract Baidehīśa Bilāsa is a seventeenth century Odiā erotic retelling of the Rāmāyaṇa. The work is particularly pertinent today, as the political right wing in India celebrates Rāma’s abstinence and represses his conjugal life in public memory. Rāma’s leaving of Sītā for his kingdom (read the Hindu nation) is further highlighted as his choosing of Dharma (duty) over Kāma (pleasure). This text reorders that binary and demonstrates how preoccupied Rāma was in fulfilling his duties as a husband. It contains multiple erotic encounters between the couple and some important (and subversive) instances of queer imagination and interaction. This article is an attempt to survey and decipher the same. And, in doing so, we intend to contribute to the scholarship on Rāmāyaṇa and the literary history of pre-modern Odisha, which has received relatively little scholarly attention.

scholarly journals Some Remarks on the History of Political Theory in Antiquity

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 9-18
Author(s):  
Laurens Winkel
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
International Law ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Textual Transmission ◽  
History Of ◽  
Philosophical Texts ◽  
Stoic Philosophy

With the help of some texts of Greek philosophers the ambivalent history of natural law philosophy is illustrated with its consequences for the rising notion of political theory and international law. Universalism and Stoic philosophy form the intellectual background for the rising Roman empire. Special attention is paid to the history of the textual transmission of some important philosophical texts, an aspect which is very often neglected.

Brittany and the Atlantic Archipelago, 450–1200

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Brett ◽  
Fiona Edmonds ◽  
Paul Russell
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Viking Age ◽  
Norman Conquest ◽  
Distinctive Character ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
Language And Literature ◽  
Fresh Perspective ◽  
History Of

How did Brittany get its name and its British-Celtic language in the centuries after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire? Beginning in the ninth century, scholars have proposed a succession of theories about Breton origins, influenced by the changing relationships between Brittany, its Continental neighbours, and the 'Atlantic Archipelago' during and after the Viking age and the Norman Conquest. However, due to limited records, the history of medieval Brittany remains a relatively neglected area of research. In this new volume, the authors draw on specialised research in the history of language and literature, archaeology, and the cult of saints, to tease apart the layers of myth and historical record. Brittany retained a distinctive character within the typical 'medieval' forces of kingship, lordship, and ecclesiastical hierarchy. The early history of Brittany is richly fascinating, and this new investigation offers a fresh perspective on the region and early medieval Europe in general.

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