Description: An account of the performance of poetry from late Antiquity to the Renaissance that explores the role and importance of poetry in western culture.
Review Quotes: "It is bracing to follow a prominent senior scholar in his exploration of so many centuries--millennia encountered not with any ex cathedra jadedness but with open enthusiasm that should immediately engage readers at every academic level." -- Stephen Hinds, University of Washington, Modern Language Quarterly
"Attridge's exploration is detailed and extensive as he considers how the demands of social norms and the changes in production technologies influenced the ways in which poetry might be experienced by readers and listeners. In turn, the volume will be of interest to those studying any of the time frames that it discusses as well as those interested in questions regarding the reception and transmission of literature." -- John S. Garrison, Renaissance Studies"...[the volume] is of significant value to classical scholarship, encouraging as it does a contextualising of ancient engagements with this literary form, and our own study of such engagements, within a much broader cultural history of poetry...this book offers an invaluable opportunity to consider the material with which we are most familiar as set within the wider evolution of poetry as a cultural phenomenon. But perhaps more significantly, we can become aware of how our perceptions of poetry by the ancient Greeks and Romans have likely been shaped by the different forms that poetry took in subsequent centuries... it should also encourage us to approach any poetry belonging to antiquity as part of a broader cultural activity than is often acknowledged." -- Emily Patterson, Bryn Mawr Classical Review