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The Afterlife of Apuleius

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.

This is the sixth and last of the volumes in the series of ‘Afterlives’ of the Classics, which is being produced jointly by the Institute of Classical Studies and the Warburg Institute.

230 pages | 6.6875 x 9.625 | © 2020

Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies Supplements

History: Ancient and Classical History

Literature and Literary Criticism: Classical Languages


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Table of Contents

1. Robert H. F. Carver. The medieval ass: re-evaluating the reception of Apuleius in the High Middle Ages 2. Andrew Laird. The white goddess in Mexico: Apuleius’ Latin, Spanish, and Nahuatl legacy in New Spain 3. Carole Boidin. The Ass goes east: Apuleius and Orientalism 4. Julia Haig Gaisser. How to tell the story of Cupid and Psyche: from Fulgentius to Galeotto Del Corretto 5. Igor Candido. Psyche’s textual journey from Apuleius to Boccaccio and Petrarch 6. Stephen Harrison. An Apuleian masque? Thomas Heywood’s Love’s Mistress (1634) 7. Regine May. Echoes of Apuleius’ novel in Mary Tighe’s Psyche: romantic imagination and self-fashioning 8. Ahuvia Kahane. Apuleius and Martianus Capella: canon, reception and pedagogy. 9. Françoise Lavocat. A translation of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses and the debate about fiction in the sixteenth century: L’asino d’oro by Agnolo Firenzuola (1550) 10. Maria Loreto Núñez. Apuleius’ Ass and Cervantes’ Dogs in Dialogue 11. Clementina Marsico. ‘He does not speak golden words: he brays’: Apuleius’ style and the humanistic lexicography 12. Andrea Severi. The Golden Ass under the lens of the ‘Bolognese commentator’ L Lucius Apuleius and Filippo Beroaldo

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