Forthcoming: Reformation Literary Criticism

We're excited to share more details about another title forthcoming in Sources in Early Poetics, an edition of Reformation Literary Criticism by Micha Lazarus, with contributions by Nathaniel Hess, Petra Matović, Fraser McIlwraith, and William Theiss:

'From the 1530s to the 1550s a school of literary thought coalesced around Philip Melanchthon and his circle at Wittenberg, the heart of the Reformation. Disseminated through Latin editions of the classical poets and dramatists, the Wittenberg school's reading of the classical corpus radiated across northern Europe. Scholars, schoolmasters, translators, and poets developed a sophisticated and coherent body of criticism that found in classical literary models the lived experience of political and confessional schism. By the 1570s, it had become the standard critical approach throughout the North, occupying the space between the reception of ancient literature and a changing Christian faith.

Yet this body of critical literature has largely fallen between the disciplinary cracks of modern scholarship. Melanchthon's day-job as Luther's theological collaborator has marginalised his literary interests. A long-standing aversion to literary "moralisation" has suppressed the complex detail of these interpretations. Standard narratives of classical reception still mostly stay south of the Alps. And the language barrier and the bibliographic dispersal of the materials have ensured that this major critical corpus remains mostly unknown to Anglophone audiences.

Reforming the Classics presents a facing-page anthology of the most important texts in this school and its Europe-wide reception, translated into English for the first time—with special contributions from Nathaniel Hess, Petra Matović, Fraser McIlwraith, and William Theiss. By gathering these texts under one roof, placing them in historical context, and consolidating existing scholarship, Reforming the Classics aims to fill in the gap between "medieval" and "Renaissance" criticism and stimulate new research in this under-studied field.'