Classical Reception and the Problem of Antiquity in Early Modern English Literature

Prologue

Classical Reception and the Problem of Antiquity in Early Modern English Literature approaches receptions of global antiquity in early modern English literature as an intellectually voracious, though often, culturally dissonant, process, shaped by the period’s evolving knowledge and surprising interpretations of ancient theologies, histories, geographies, cultural norms, and literary forms. I argue that these protean and polyglot receptions understood the cultural development of England in relation to the development of civilizations in Asia, Africa, and the Americas in an age before European hegemony.

Early modern antiquarianism was a fragmentary and creative reconstruction of the ancient past, received by way of translations, anecdotes, and fragments, and shaped by circumstance, curiosity, and context. As such, early modern receptions of global antiquity are animated by pervasive tensions between the canonical and the vernacular, the foreign and the familiar, the part and the whole. Accordingly, I treat the problem of antiquity as an aporia. Though antiquity conferred authority, legitimacy, eloquence, and prestige when applied to law, governance, language, and culture, it simultaneously unsettled these affordances. Discerning writers and travelers were often aware that Indic, Sinitic, Jewish, Ethiopic, Egyptian, Andean, and Islamicate civilizations, quite like Greco-Roman culture, were older than their own. Indeed, in many cases, they were more scientifically sophisticated, politically complex, and philosophically articulated, with longer intellectual genealogies and older cosmological and theological traditions, prompting readers and travelers to draw on their examples.

Early modern studies scholarship has shown that the prestige ascribed to Latin and Greek, and Greco-Roman culture, often triggered anxieties about deficiencies in English education, culture, and eloquence. Working in the shadow of their provinciality, writers often engaged in comparative historiography, conjectural cartography, literary fabulation, and cross-cultural analysis in an aspirationally and experimentally. When merchants, travelers, and missionaries set forth overseas, the Greco-Roman archive, in particular (though also other notions of antiquity) most frequently supplied theoretical frameworks, vocabularies, maps, and ideals that English travelers reverted to when in doubt about the antiquity of a particular region, so much so that this trope in travel nonfiction soon became a habit in travel nonfiction, and a literary habit, more generally. Confronted by the complex and distinctive ways of understanding space and time in these foreign cultures, writers struggled to make sense of how the complex networks of kingdoms, empires, tribes, and principalities of these lands had developed in relation to their own past. More often than not, they were at a loss, given their lack of linguistic proficiency and ecogeographical familiarity, particularly in the earlier phases of encounter. Their voracious desire for knowledge about the places and peoples coexisted with the desire for material gain. The natural human tendencies of lust, anger, and greed activated by these lower desires only exacerbated distorted and acquistive ways of sensing and perceiving antiquity, leading the imposition of narrow and ideologies of temporality and being.

References to the antiquity of human civilization both legitimized and undermined ideas about English cultural superiority. Antiquity remained a site of irresolution even as it became a point of articulation. Encountering the relativity of time and space in early modern globalization incited new questions about origins and endings, word and thought, form and substance, nature and civilization, life and afterlife, birth and rebirth, morality and immorality, ascension and declension. Examining sixteenth- seventeenth- and eighteenth-century interpretations of ancient forms, like utopias, georgics, and romances, I show how writers are caught between the classical antiquity they inherited and aspired after, the global antiquity they encountered and sought to appropriate, the imagined antiquity they invented for imaginative ends, and the scientific antiquity they began to discover within and without England.

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