The Renaissance Epic and the Oral Past

This book explores why Renaissance epic poetry clung to fictions of song and oral performance in an age of growing literacy. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poets, Anthony Welch argues, came to view their written art as newly distinct from the oral cultures of their ancestors. Welch shows how the periods writers imagined lost civilizations built on speech and songfrom Homeric Greece and Celtic Britain to the Americasand struggled to reconcile this oral inheritance with an early modern culture of the book. Welchs wide-ranging study offers a new perspective on Renaissance Europes epic literature and its troubled relationship with antiquity.