Latin Literature: A History [Hardcover]

Professor Gian Biagio Conte (Author), Professor Don P. Fowler (Editor), Professor Glen W. Most (Editor), Professor Joseph Solodow (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 1994

This authoritative history of Latin literature offers a comprehensive survey of the thousand-year period from the origins of Latin as a written language to the early Middle Ages. At once a reference work, a bibliographic guide, a literary study, and a reader's handbook, Latin Literature: A History is the first work of its kind to appear in English in nearly four decades. From the first examples of written Latin through Gregory of Tours in the sixth century and the Venerable Bede in the seventh, Latin Literature offers a wide-ranging panorama of all major Latin authors. Including names, dates, edition citations, and detailed summaries, the work combines the virtues of an encyclopedia with the critical intelligence readers have come to expect from Italy's leading Latinist, Gian Biagio Conte.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Conte gives the sort of biographical and historical information that might be expected in a book of this type, but with a more sophisticated awareness of the fragility of much of it than one finds in many other text books. He also gives an unfailingly intelligent and interesting account of the works themselves... His mastery of the vast range of literature that he covers is remarkable." -- Jasper Griffin, New York Review of Books

"It will quickly become not only the preferred textbook but the standard resource for mainstream evaluations of the major surviving Latin authors through the early Middle Ages... Conte covers this era by discussing the principle writers in Latin with a remarkably concise thoroughness." -- Reader's Review

"Conte has achieved a monumental feat most scholars would shrink from attempting... [With] its relish for forgotten or underrated authors and its tight focus on cultural significance, his history shows the restlessness many late 20th-century Latinists feel with the state of their subject." -- Emily Gowers, London Review of Books

Book Description

The authoriatative history of Latin literature.

"His mastery of the vast range of literature that he covers is remarkable." - NY Review of Books

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 827 pages
• Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press; Revised edition (March 1, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0801846382
• ISBN-13: 978-0801846380
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,534,892 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Classical Brilliance, October 2, 1998

By 

Umit Dhuga ([e-mail]) (Berkeley, California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Latin Literature: A History (Hardcover)

Gian Biagio Conte's 'Letteratura Latina' is a work of brilliance that will probably stand as the foremost catalogue and compendium of Latin Literary History for a long time, and I cannot imagine what scholar(s) possess the right mixture of insight and brevity to replace it. Conte's treatment of Latin Literature is honest, intensely informative, void of pretention and, much to the anticipated surprise of lay readers, rather engaging in the contemporary Johns Hopkins English translation. The simultaneous yet uncompromised treatment of Roman politics, poetry, law, literature, art and history is certain to interest readers of all disciplines.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Best reference history, March 5, 2007

By 

SkookumPete (Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Latin Literature: A History (Paperback)

I agree with a previous reviewer that there are some editorial problems with this English translation/revision of Conte's work (e.g. "Revelations" for the last book of the Bible -- most literate people know that the book is titled "Revelation"). Nonetheless this is the best available reference history of Latin literature, replete with facts as well as appreciation. Coverage extends well into the Middle Ages, with brief discussions of even minor figures. This book is clearly to be preferred over the Latin volume of the Cambridge History of Classical Literature, which (as the preface to Conte's book says) is just a collection of essays "varying in approach and critical acumen...while presupposing the reader's command of all the elementary facts".

19 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars bitter; irreplaceable, November 15, 2001

By 

Russael BK Johanys (Seoul, Korea) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Latin Literature: A History (Paperback)

My review of this book is, sadly, mixed. First, I must say, I intend to reread it soon, it's the best Latin Literary History I know of, and there are many useful features including a cookbook format and many appendices of terms. However, the book is also a bit of a hash. When I read the foreword apparatus by the editor I realized that we were not to have a properly edited book. This book was translated and re-hashed around by a committee. Two scholars adapted it for the American readership, so the gushy editor tells us. We were not given anywhere near enough information about what was done by whom on what principles. There was no translator's statement. I could not detect the original author's voice. I fear the editorial team did not take its work seriously enough. All through the book there were repetitions, inconsistencies, as though different people were responsible for different sections which were later assembled and inadequately edited. Three examples. 1) Nowhere in the book is the crucial term latifundium defined. 2) in one place the term floruit is used, in another place "flourishing", and nowhere is it defined. It was made to sound like 60, when surely it is 40. 3) We are not given Ambrose's full name nor his death date. Surely we know them. Whereas this information was standardly given for the other church fathers. I could go on and on. If you think these are trivial examples, then this book is for you. What this book needed above all was a better editor. What it really needed above all was the sifting and sorting by a single grand mind. And perhaps that is what Gian Biagio Conte is. But perhaps his work has been layered over by these other American minds. There were in fact many times while reading that I felt swept up with the superior insights of the book into this literature. Of course, the history of Rome is a bitter one. I hate its trajectory. And its literature is as derivative as European ones. Rome is the first humanistic culture, based on the mishmash of archaic, classic, and hellenistic greek, mixed with some native forms. All this the book shows, though more in brilliant flashes than in grand sweep. I wish the bones of the scholarship had been presented more. It's important to know who has said what about what. Conte does mention the problems. But I had this sense, beyond the cookbook hash, that there were white spaces that were not being discussed. In the end I suspect Conte has been done a disservice that I only hope can be corrected for round two.