Mythography and Cultural Identity in the Early Modern World
SEMCR CALL FOR PAPERS SCS PHILADELPHIA 2025
The Society for Early Modern Classical Reception (SEMCR) invites proposals for papers to be delivered at the 2025 meeting of the Society for Classical Studies in Philadelphia, PA. For its tenth annual panel, SEMCR invites abstracts on the theme of Mythography and Cultural Identity in the Early Modern World.
The medieval legend of Brutus, supposedly a descendant of Aeneas and the first king of Britain, long persisted in the local cultural imagination. Reported by Geoffrey of Monmouth, among others, the story continued to be treated as factual in early modern Britain, most famously in Holinshed’s Chronicles (Ashe 2013). The 18th century poet John Hildebrand composed an English epic, Brutus The Trojan: Founder of the British Empire, heavily influenced by Vergil’s Aeneid. Tales of Trojan descent are perhaps the best known examples of mythography harnessed in the service of medieval and early modern cultural identities, whether in British, Frankish, Italian, or other regional contexts (Hopkins 2002, Peters 2018). The range of such genealogical associations was much broader than Trojan or other Greek myths, however, encompassing late Roman historical figures, such as the mother of the emperor Constantine, Helena (another pseudo-Briton), or Biblical figures such as David (claimed as an early ancestor of the Hapsburgs) (Tanner 1993). There are numerous foundational legends in Spain linked to Hercules, from his battle with Geryon near la Coruña with its extant “Tower of Hercules” to the “Cave of Hercules” in Toledo, remnant of his once enchanted palace (González García). Odysseus was said to be the founder of Lisbon, capital of the intrepid Portuguese explorers (Van der Laan 2020). As an expression of cultural strategic aims, therefore, mythography provided a rich and flexible resource within the political economy of prestige.
Beyond the overt function of creating prestige, these accounts also highlight the role played by genealogies in the construction of community (rather than familial or aristocratic) identity. In his epic Amyris, for instance, the humanist Gian Mario Filelfo elaborates on the tradition associating the Turks with the Trojans, inventing a mythical Othman as a prehistoric ancestor of the Trojan Erichthonius, and through him eventually the Ottoman rulers Osman I and Filelfo’s contemporary Mehmed II. In this way, Mehmed’s western conquests are imaginatively reconceived as retribution for the Greek destruction of his ancestral Troy (Peters 2018).
We therefore seek abstracts for papers that detail how early moderns made use of mythography in the construction of cultural identity, and how that practice connects ancient narratives to communities and nation states in the 21st century.
We are committed to creating a congenial and collaborative forum for the infusion of new ideas into classics, and hence welcome abstracts that are exploratory in nature as well as abstracts of latter-stage research. Above all, we aim to show how the field of early modern classical reception can bear on a wide range of literary and cultural study, and to dispel the notion of an intimidating barrier to entry.
Abstracts of no more than 400 words (excluding bibliography) and suitable for a 15-20 minute presentation should be sent as an email attachment to ariane.schwartz@gmail.com. All persons who submit abstracts must be SCS members in good standing. The abstracts will be judged anonymously: please do not identify yourself in any way on the abstract page. Proposals must be received by March 15, 2024.
Works Cited
Ashe, L. (2013). “Holinshed and Mythical History”, in Felicity Heal, Ian W. Archer, and Paulina Kewes (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed's Chronicles. Online edn, Oxford Academic.
González García, F.J. (2014). “The Legendary Traditions about the Tower of Hercules (A Coruña, Spain)”. Folklore 125: 306-21.
Hopkins, L. (2002). “We were the Trojans: British national identities in 1633”. Renaissance Studies 16: 36-51.
Peters, C. (2018). "Claiming and Contesting Trojan Ancestry on Both Sides of the Bosporus – Epic Answers to an Ethnographic Dispute in Quattrocento Humanist Poetry", in The Quest for an Appropriate Past in Literature, Art and Architecture. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.
Tanner, M. (1993). The Last Descendant of Aeneas: The Hapsburgs and the Mythic Image of the Emperor. New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press.
Van der Laan, S. (2020). “Making Sense of an Ending: Camões's Odyssean Epic”. MLN 135:1078-93.