Homer’s Heirs, Circe’s Daughters: Succession as Metaphor for Reception in Renaissance Epic

Professor Sarah Van der Laan, Associate Professor of English at the University of Kansas, will give a hybrid talk for the Metaphors of Reception, Reception as Metaphor working group, titled "Homer’s Heirs, Circe’s Daughters: Succession as Metaphor for Reception in Renaissance Epic."

Ever since the early Latin epic poet Ennius claimed to be the possessor of Homer’s soul, poets have construed membership in the European epic tradition as a matter of Homeric inheritance, confirmed through authorizing speech with, as, or for Homer. But what happens when the poet who would speak as that Homeric successor is a woman? How do metaphors for the reception of epic tradition and knowledge – and the authority they confer to create new epic– shift to accommodate that shift in gender? In Moderata Fonte’s Floridoro (1581), the first original Italian chivalric romance authored by a woman, metempsychosis gives way to maternity. Fonte invents a daughter for Circe and Odysseus, who narrates much of the poem and becomes Fonte’s avatar within it. Floridoro’s attention to female inheritance, through bloodline, inspiration and education, sheds new light on female Renaissance readers’ reception of epic and offers a unique perspective from which to consider the intersection of classical reception, gender and creative reception. Fonte imagines epic matter and poiesis alike as originally feminine gifts, usurped by later male voices but still accessible to female intellects who know their art’s roots and can lay claim to a specifically female prophetic and poetic lineage. She charts a path for women into epic authorship and agency from their marginal status in society and the epic canon alike, and she presents that path as a reclamation of the original order of the cosmos.

Professor Sarah Van der Laan writes and teaches about the European epic tradition and the culture of the European Renaissance. Her work centers on a genre—epic, conceived expansively enough to include both romance and opera—and a concept: literary explorations of the value of human experience. Her research and teaching arise from a set of core concerns: how does literature offer “tools for living,” in Kenneth Burke’s phrase: ethical reflections on and solutions for the difficulties of ordinary human experience? How can literature be understood as thought experiment, a testing ground for the psychological and social consequences of proposed solutions to religious, ethical, or personal dilemmas? She approaches epic as a conversation about ideas of community, nation, heroism, agency, the scope and the limitations of human nature. The power of epic, she argues, lies in its profound commitment to asking hard questions and wrestling with complex issues in public.

Co-sponsored by the Metaphors of Reception, Reception as Metaphor (MoRRaM) working group and the Humanities Institute.