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Reading Sulpicia

Commentaries 1475 - 1990

Mathilde Skoie author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Oxford University Press

Published:16th May '02

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Reading Sulpicia cover

Focusing on the representation of the Augustan poet Sulpicia in commentaries, this book investigates the interpretative strategies involved in the reading of an ancient text. Mathilde Skoie discusses a selection of commentaries from the Renaissance to the present day, combining the history of classical scholarhip, philology, feminist literary theory, and reception theory. The six short love poems of Sulpicia (Corpus Tibullianum 3. 13-18) have, throughout history, been the subject of numerous different interpretations and judgements. The poems' ambivalent status as poetry, the uncertainties surrounding authorship, the female intrusion in a male-dominated world, and questions about canon and 'feminine Latin' are some of the many issues that make them interesting for an investigation of classical scholarship. The poems can thus be used as a showcase for how commentaries are an interpretative and historically situated genre. Reading Sulpicia is the first monograph on Sulpicia and her reception, and thereby fills a gap in the literature concerning both reception studies and the study of Sulpicia herself.

... offers a fresh look at the tradition of scholarship that the poems have inspired ... Reading Sulpicia is a welcome contribution, both for what it reveals about the processes of reading intrinsic to the commentary and for the range of topics that it addresses. * AJP *
... an impressive display of scholarship ... [Skoie] offers an accessible and incisive case-study in the hermeneutics of reading and reception, and as an erudite analysis of the gendered dynamics of reading one of classical literature's most challenging authors her book offers a valuable new contribution to the field. * Journal of Roman Studies *

ISBN: 9780199245734

Dimensions: 223mm x 147mm x 26mm

Weight: 646g

376 pages