Dr Bryan Brazeau, Senior Teaching Fellow in Liberal Arts, has recently published an article in Classical Receptions Journal entitled “‘Defying Gravity’: Prose Epic and Heroic Style in Lucrezia Marinella’s 1602 Vita di Maria Vergine.”

"The article examines Lucrezia Marinella’s literary-theoretical declaration at the beginning of the 1602 Vita di Maria Vergine by contextualizing her claims within contemporary debates on whether epic, particularly Christian epic, can be written in a style of high prose. It demonstrates that although Marinella seems to rely more heavily on Aristotle’s Rhetoric, her choices in writing this epic in a high prose style were greatly influenced by the Poetics and contemporary discussions surrounding the text (along with a misunderstanding of the text itself). The essay also contains (as an appendix) the first English-language translation of Marinella’s literary theoretical preface, ‘To the Readers’."

The article forms part of a special issue edited by Vladimir Brljak (Durham) and Micha Lazarus (Warburg) gathering "path-breaking new work on the literary criticism of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Europe and Latin America, a domain of literary and intellectual history which represents one of the richest and most enduring strains of the classical heritage in this period". The publication emerges from the collaborative Poetics Before Modernity project, of which Bryan is a member of the editorial board.