Defining Authorship, Debating Authenticity: Problems of Authority from Classical Antiquity to the Renaissance

by Roberta Berardi (Editor), Martina Filosa (Editor), Davide Massimo (Editor)

This volume explores the themes of authorship and authenticity – and connected issues – from the Classical Antiquity to the Renaissance. Its reflection is constructed within a threefold framework. A first section includes topics dealing with dubious or uncertain attribution of ancient works, homonymous writers, and problems regarding the reliability of compilation literature. The middle section goes through several issues concerning the balance between the author’s contribution to their own work and the role of collaborators, pupils, circles, reviewers, scribes, and even older sources, but also the influence of different compositional stages on the concept of ‘author’, and the challenges presented by anonymous texts. Finally, a third crucial section on authenticity and forgeries concludes the it contains contributions dealing with spurious works – or sections of works – , mechanisms of interpolation, misattribution, and deliberate forgery. The aim of the book is therefore to exemplify the many nuances of the complex problems of authenticity and authorship of ancient texts.

380 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 26, 2020

About the author

Italian. Uk based. Teacher of Latin and Greek. Oxford DPhil in Classics, still writing academic papers. Regular theatre goer. I read avidly.

I write about literature at https://www.classicult.it/author/robe...

Academic profile: https://oxford.academia.edu/RobertaBe...

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