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  • The Space That Remains: Reading Latin Poetry in Late Antiquity by Aaron Pelttari
  • Ian Fielding
The Space That Remains: Reading Latin Poetry in Late Antiquity. Aaron Pelttari Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014. Pp. xi + 190. ISBN 978–0-8014–5276–5.

These are exciting times to be reading late Latin poetry. Although it is a field that—in Anglophone scholarship, at least—has not always attracted the same level of attention as other areas of late antique studies, the last ten years have seen the publication of a number of important monographs on individual poets such as Prudentius, Claudian, and Venantius Fortunatus. In scope and methodology, however, Aaron Pelttari’s book is perhaps the most ambitious study of late antique Latin poetry since Roberts’s The Jeweled Style: Poetry and Poetics in Late Antiquity (Ithaca, 1989). Pelttari continues Roberts’s project of outlining the aesthetic trends that are characteristic of poetry in this period, and The Space That Remains offers an indication of how approaches to late antique poetics have developed in the generation after Roberts’s seminal work. Roberts was influenced by the Rezeptionästhetik of Jauss, and his attempts to explain late Latin poetry in terms of its own historical “horizon of expectations” can be seen as an early exercise in the hermeneutics of reception, which were to become increasingly prominent in the interpretation of Latin literature during the 1990s. Drawing on these ideas, Pelttari shows that late antique authors had their own theories of reception, and that the realization of meaning by the reader is a key theme of many late Latin texts.

The Space That Remains has four chapters, any one of which might have [End Page 292] been expanded into a monograph—or even, into several monographs—by a less inquisitive scholar than Pelttari. Although he takes his main examples from the poems of Ausonius, Prudentius, and Claudian, it is worth pointing out that his survey includes a range of other prose and verse authors from the fourth and early fifth centuries. In the first chapter, for instance, he provides an introduction to late antique interpretive practices by comparing the comments of Jerome and Augustine on the exegesis of Scripture to those of Macrobius on the exegesis of Virgil and Cicero. These are different spheres of activity, as Pelttari is careful to observe (43), and the comparison could have been reinforced with more detailed examination of the attitudes of Jerome and Augustine to the reading of Latin poetry. It is made clear nonetheless that these Christian writers held similar ideals to the pagan Macrobius of the “author-as-reader” (17) and of “writing as an act of reception” (32)—ideals that, Pelttari suggests, attest to a widespread view of reading as a “strong and influential act” (43) in Late Antiquity.

Pelttari’s interest in exegesis extends beyond late antiquity to the critical theory of the twentieth century. In his third chapter, he applies Umberto Eco’s category of opera aperta, works of art open to multiple interpretations, to late antique poems that display distinct “layers” of meaning: Optatianus Porfyrius’ figural poetry; Prudentius’ allegorical Psychomachia; and the Virgilian centos composed by Proba and Ausonius, among others. The second chapter treats the prefaces of Claudian, Prudentius, and Ausonius as “paratexts,” adopting Genette’s designation for the peripheral features that present a text to its reader (titles, indices, etc.). This willingness to take new approaches to late Latin poetry is refreshing, although the tendency to theoretical abstraction need not exclude consideration of the “social and material realities of reading,” which Pelttari leaves to one side after p. 8. The concept of the “paratext,” in particular, draws attention to the materiality of poetic texts. Pelttari stresses in his discussion that Augustan poets like Virgil, Horace, and Propertius avoided prefaces (49, 72), but without observing that their works do include sphragides, which as Peirano has now demonstrated (in L. Jansen [ed.], The Roman Paratext: Frame, Texts, Readers [Cambridge, 2014], 224–42), can also be seen as “paratexts” by ‘sealing’ a roll of papyrus and which perform similar functions to Pelttari’s late antique prefaces. In this case, it would be worthwhile to reflect on the...

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