Convivium: David Ungvary, Ashes to Ashes, Cover to Cover: Perusing Christian Poetry Books in the Post-Roman West
When and Where
Speakers
Description
David Ungvary, Associate Professor of Classics at Bard College, kicks off the Winter Convivium series with a lecture on Christian Poetry Books in the Post-Roman West.
Abstract
What was it like—and what did it mean—to author, to publish, to read through a book of poems in the post-Roman West? This lecture approaches these questions through exploration of the dazzling poetry of Eugenius of Toledo (d. 657), bishop and literary star of Visigothic Spain, and the peculiar and precarious book culture of seventh-century Iberia.
At the center of Eugenius’s corpus stands the Libellus carminum, a collection of 101 Latin poems that features as one of the only lyric poetry books to have circulated in post-Roman Late Antiquity. An instant classic, its verses were excerpted for anthologies, reused in local epitaphs, and cited in school textbooks. But not a single copy of the whole book survives.
The paradox of the extreme fragility and select success of the Libellus’ transmission invites deeper reflection on the nature of poetics, reading, and books themselves in this context. If issuing a poetry book into the Visigothic world was to risk its rapid disintegration, what strategies were available to poets to maintain their arrangements, encourage sequential reading, or keep a codex intact? And how might readers and scribes respond? The poems of the Libellus, I'll suggest, offer us clues.
Biography
Associate Professor of Classics at Bard College, David Ungvary's research revolves around intersections of literature, selfhood, and social life in the late antique Latin West, ca. 200-800 AD. Professor Ungvary is particularly interested in the evolution of Romanness through the Middle Ages, the development of Christian literature, and in associated transformations of Latin intellectual and literary practice.