Setting Plato Straight : Translating Ancient Sexuality in the Renaissance / Todd W. Reeser.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Reeser, Todd W., Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Plato--Translations--History and criticism.

Plato.

Plato--Themes, motives.

Homosexuality in literature.

Eroticism in literature.

Greek literature--Europe--Translations--History and criticism.

Greek literature.

Translating and interpreting--Europe--History.

Translating and interpreting.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (403 p.)

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, [2015]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

When we talk of platonic love or relationships today, we mean something very different from what Plato meant. For this, we have fifteenth and sixteenth-century European humanists to thank. As these scholars-most of them Catholic-read, digested, and translated Plato, they found themselves faced with a fundamental problem: how to be faithful to the text yet not propagate pederasty or homosexuality. In Setting Plato Straight, Todd W. Reeser undertakes the first sustained and comprehensive study of Renaissance textual responses to Platonic same-sex sexuality. Reeser mines an expansive collection of translations, commentaries, and literary sources to study how Renaissance translators transformed ancient eros into non-erotic, non-homosexual relations. He analyzes the interpretive lenses translators employed and the ways in which they read and reread Plato's texts. In spite of this cleansing, Reeser finds surviving traces of Platonic same-sex sexuality that imply a complicated, recurring process of course-correction-of setting Plato straight.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Preface: Strictly Platonic

Note on Translations Used

Introduction

1. Solving the Problem with Plato

2. The Antitheses of Same- Sex Sexuality in Bruni

3. Ficino and the Theory of Purging Same- Sex Sexuality

4. Ficino and the Practice of Purging Same- Sex Sexuality

5. Importing Ficino: Gender Balance in Champier

6. Seducing Socrates: The Silenus in Erasmus and Rabelais

7. The Gates of Germania: Space, Place, and Sexuality in Cornarius

8. Fractured Men: Feminism and Neoplatonism in Mid- Sixteenth- Century France

9. Orientations: Female- Female and Male- Male Eros in Dialogue

10. Reading Sexuality Skeptically in Montaigne 284 Conclusion: Bending Plato

Appendix: Major Translations of Plato's Erotic Dialogues

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Notes:

Includes index.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

9780226307145

022630714X

OCLC:

1058327032