The Afterlife of Virgil

From his own middle age onwards, Virgil has been revered as perhaps the greatest poet of the Latin language. Moreover, no classical Latin author has a more continuous history of copying, study, and imitation than Virgil. He has been centrally important to the transmission of the classical tradition, and has played a unique role in European education. It was as a contribution to the richness of his reception that one of the first conferences in the joint Warburg Institute and Institute of Classical Studies series on the afterlife of the Classics was devoted to the afterlife of Virgil, on 8-9 May 2014.
This volume publishes papers from that conference: they range in time from Petrarch to eighteenth-century Eastern Europe, focusing on three main areas: Italian Renaissance poetry, scholarship and visual art; English responses to Virgil's poetry; and, more unusually, emerging literatures in Eastern Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. [Within Virgil's work there is a strong focus on the ways in which later writers and artists have used the Eclogues and the Aeneid.]