Publisher's Synopsis
Apuleius' literary and philosophical fortune has been considerable since antiquity, mostly through the reception of The Golden Ass. The aim of this collection of essays is to highlight a few major aspects of this afterlife, from the High Middle Ages to early Romanticism, in the fields of literature, linguistics and philology, within a wide geographical scope.
The
volume gathers the proceedings of an international conference held in March
2016 at the Warburg Institute in London, in association with the Institute of
Classical Studies. It includes both diachronic overviews and specific
case-studies. A first series of papers focuses on The Golden Ass and its historical and geographical diffusion, from
High Medieval Europe to early modern Mexico. The oriental connections of the
book are also taken into account. The second part of the book examines the textual
and visual destiny of Psyche's story from the Apuleian fabula to allegorical retellings, in poetical or philosophical
books and on stage. As the third series of essays indicates, the fortunes of
the book led many ancient and early modern writers and translators to use it as
a canonical model for reflections about the status of fiction. It also became,
mostly around the beginning of the fifteenth century, a major linguistic and
stylistic reference for lexicographers and neo-Latin writers : the last
papers of the book deal with Renaissance polemics about 'Apuleianism' and the
role of editors and commentators.
