The Choice of Odysseus

The Choice of Odysseus demonstrates how the Odyssey provided Renaissance authors and readers with a poetic ethics for their age. Sarah Van der Laan reconstructs Renaissance readings of the Odyssey by Petrarch, Poliziano, Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, Monteverdi, and Milton to recover a powerful Renaissance tradition of Odyssean epic.

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The Choice of Odysseus demonstrates how the Odyssey provided Renaissance authors and readers with a poetic ethics—tools for living developed in poetry—to navigate the challenges of their age. As they endured schisms, ruptures, and failures of ideals, readers and poets turned to the Odyssey for narratives of recovery and aftermath. Sarah Van der Laan reconstructs Renaissance readings of the Odyssey from myriad sources. Situating major works by Petrarch, Poliziano, Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, Monteverdi, and Milton in these Odyssean contexts, she recovers a powerful Renaissance tradition of Odyssean epic. Renaisance poets adopted the Odyssey as an epic model that supplements and even opposes the Virgilian epic model of conquest and imperial foundation. For Renaissance readers and authors, the Odyssey renders heroic other kinds of lived experience: the necessity of facing the world and its challenges with only human wisdom and reason; the ability to integrate traumatic detours and reversals into a vision of a successful and accomplished self; the recovery of a private life and personal desires painfully suspended for public service. Emphasizing marriage, reconciliation, homecoming, and the return to private life and private desires as suitably heroic matter for epic and powerful conventions for narrative and poetic closure, the Renaissance Odyssey and the epics and operas it inspired confer a uniquely heroic status on experience for men and women alike.