Reception and Appropriations of Classical Culture

Last update: 12 Apr 2025 20:27
First version: 9 January 2015

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Yet Another Inadequate Placeholder

That is, how later cultures have reacted to, and made use of, the culture of the classical civilization of the Mediterranean basin.

See also:
• Erasmus
• Gnosticism
• Islamic Civilization
• Lucretius
• the Renaissance
• Vergil

Recommended (very misc.):
• Don Cameron Allen, Mysteriously Meant: The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance
• Alfarabi, "The Political Regime" and Summary of Plato's Laws
• E. M. Butler, The Tyranny of Greece over Germany: A Study of the Influence Exercised by Greek Art and Poetry over the Great German Writers of the 18th, 19th and 20th Centuries
• Jim al-Khalili, The House of Wisdom: How Arabic Science Saved Ancient Knowledge and Gave Us the Renaissance
• Jennifer Tolbert Roberts, Athens on Trial: The Antidemocratic Tradition in Western Thought
• George Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance [As I try to bring out in my review, much of this very interesting book is actually about this topic... Author's self-presentation]
• Catherine Wilson, Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity

To read:
• Robert Casagrande-Kim, Samuel Thrope and Raquel Ukeles, Romance and Reason: Islamic Transformations of the Classical Past
• Luba Freedman, The Revival of the Olympian Gods in Renaissance Art
• Emma Gee, Aratus and the Astronomical Tradition
• Ellen Greene (ed.), Re-Reading Sappho: Reception and Transmission
• Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arab Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early Abbasid Society (2nd-4th and 8th-10th C.)
• Stephen Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems
• Robert Lamberton, Homer the Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading and the Growth of the Epic Tradition
• Suzanne L. Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750--1970
• Anthony Ossa-Richardson, The Devil's Tabernacle: The Pagan Oracles in Early Modern Thought
• Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Reanscences in Western Art
• Annabel Patterson (ed.), Roman Images: The Idea of Rome in Western Cultural History
• Todd W. Reeser, Setting Plato Straight: Translating Ancient Sexuality in the Renaissance
• L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature
• Franz Rosenthal, The Classical Heritage in Islam
• Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and Its Place in Reanissance Humanism and Art
• Benjamin Wardhaugh, Encounters with Euclid: How an Ancient Greek Geometry Text Shaped the World