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  • Homer and the Question of Strife from Erasmus to Hobbes by Jessica Wolfe
  • Sarah van der Laan
Jessica Wolfe. Homer and the Question of Strife from Erasmus to Hobbes. University of Toronto Press 2015. xvi, 608. $110.00

A brief review can scarcely do justice to Jessica Wolfe's important and wide-ranging new book on Homer in late Renaissance thought. Wolfe focuses on one of the principal topics – the relationship between concord and strife, philia and eris – that the Homeric poems were used to explore in the late Renaissance. She foregrounds an "eirenic, ironic, and irreverent" Homer, whom she presents as an alternative to a supposedly dominant "high and serious poet who valorizes conflict and martial heroism." In doing so, she amply demonstrates that Renaissance readings of Homer were often more sophisticated, and more complex in their hermeneutics, than is sometimes assumed. On the whole, the work's aspirations are amply realized and its ambitions thoroughly justified. This is a major contribution to all of the fields in which it intervenes, and one that will fundamentally reshape discussions of Homer and classical reception in the Renaissance.

Wolfe's chapters centre on Erasmus, Philippe Melanchthon, Francois Rabelais, Edmund Spenser, George Chapman, John Milton, and Thomas Hobbes. Although the centre of gravity from the third chapter onward is England, continental developments receive ample attention, especially in philosophy and intellectual history. This is primarily a history of ideas, intellectual conflict, and rhetoric. Questions of poetics are not neglected, [End Page 332] however; the chapter on Spenser, perhaps the most traditionally "literary," explores The Faerie Queene's extensive narrative debts to Homer before turning to its ethical debts: strife's ability to create competition that unifies rather than divides and, thus, contributes to justice and social harmony. Spenser's affinities with Erasmus and Melanchthon, the other optimists of Wolfe's study, provide a pivot from Wolfe's delightful discussion of the origins of Rabelaisian satire in Homer to a fascinating pursuit of her "other Homer" through seventeenth-century English thought and literature.

The excellent chapter on Chapman presents a compelling analysis of Chapman's translation as an effort to restore Homer's original ironic intent through translation choices often dismissed as mistaken. Chapman's "scoptic" Homer subsequently becomes an important predecessor for Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida and, in later chapters, Milton and Hobbes. The former of these is perhaps the strongest chapter of all and required reading for Miltonists. Focusing primarily on Paradise Lost, Wolfe persuasively explores Milton's use of Homeric models of deliberation and maps those models onto his poetic and ethical treatment of the liminal moments of dawn and dusk. While attuned to the moments in which Milton problematizes Homeric ethics and uses Homeric allusion to demonstrate Satan's corruption, this chapter is a welcome and persuasive addition to the list of works that take seriously the idea that Milton builds his poetics and ethics on collaboration (not competition) between classical and Christian, Greek and Hebrew thought. A final chapter on Hobbes demonstrates the affinities between his deeply tendentious translations of the Iliad and Odyssey and his political philosophy. Wolfe not only shows that Hobbes treats Homer as "a poet who strives to explain the causes of discord and to identify possible solutions to it, not to license it" – a figure closely akin to Hobbes himself – but points suggestively to moments in Hobbes's earlier work in which Homeric influence, or affinities, appear.

As Wolfe notes, Renaissance readers, like their classical counterparts, frequently regarded Homer as an encyclopaedic author. Her own book serves a similar function; the deeply learned text with its extensive notes and bibliography (for which the University of Toronto Press is to be commended) present not only a commanding argument but also a cornucopia of invaluable information assembled through more than a decade of research. Classical and Renaissance translations and commentaries, Reformation controversialist texts, rhetorical treatises, philosophical discourses, and plays are only a sampling of the extraordinary range of sources consulted. Occasionally, the non-specialist reader may feel momentarily daunted, as contextual information has sometimes been sacrificed to make room for original research. Yet that reader should persevere for summaries of the Reuchlin affair...

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