Recreating Ancient History: Episodes From the Greek and Roman Past in the Arts and Literature of the Early Modern Period

The papers in this volume offer examples of how historians, writers, playwrights, and painters in the early modern period used ancient history as a rich field of raw material that could be used, recycled, and adapted to new needs and purposes. They focused on classical antiquity as a source from which they could recreate the past as a way of understanding and legitimizing the present. The contributors to this volume have addressed a number of important, common issues that span a wide range of subjects from fifteenth-century Italian painting to the teaching of Greek history in eighteenth-century Germany. This volume is of interest for historians of the early modern period from all disciplines and for all those interested in the reception of classical antiquity.


This publication has also been published in hardback, please click here for details.

Karl Enenkel teaches Latin and Neo-Latin Literature in the Department of Classics, Leiden University.
Jan L. de Jong is Assistant Professor of Italian Renaissance Art at Groningen University, The Netherlands.
Jeanine De Landtsheer is a Research Fellow at the Catholic University of Leuven.