This volume collects fourteen papers delivered at a conference on the classics and classicism held at the University of Hamburg in December 2016. In their introduction, the editors Marc Föcking and Claudia Schindler examine the antithesis between the terms classical and classicistic as applied to literary texts, and summarize the essays that follow, whose lengthy German titles I here abridge in English.

In “Typologies of Foundational Figures,” Anja Wolkenhauer explores the “invention of tradition” (a 1983 coinage of Eric J. Hobsbawm) and highlights the canonical texts: Pliny's Natural History 7.57 and Polydore Vergil's De Inventoribus (1499). Within this classical genre, Polydore Vergil strikes a modern, Albertian note when he extols printing among the nova reperta that surpass the ancients. In “Giraldi's Classicizing Canons of Poetry,” Florian Mehltretter examines the innovative categories of poetic genres in Gregorio Lilio Giraldi's 1545 Dialogi Decem, whose discussion of ancient poetry Gerardus Vossius would laud in 1647 as “a work of great genius and immense learning.” Although he says little about the 1551 dialogue On Modern Poets—now available in the I Tatti Renaissance Library, edited by John H. Grant (2011)—Mehltretter reveals Giraldi's debt here to the humanist poetics of Poliziano, Pontano, and Bembo, as well as to Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio.

Dennis Pausch's “Pliny, Cicero, and Canonical Correspondence” examines how Pliny the Younger molds his epistolary identity after Cicero, exploiting inter alia the Ciceronian antithesis between otium and negotium. In “Improvisation und Innovation: Statius's Silvae as Emerging Classic,” Meike Rühl, the author of a 2006 monograph on the Silvae, surveys how Petronius, Pliny, and Quintilian conceive improvisatory verse; and she notes how Poliziano's 1480 Oratio Super Fabio Quintiliano et Statii Silvis redimensions Quintilian's strictures on Statius. Hartmut Wulfram's “Petrarch's Epystola 3.28” provides a close reading of the poet's twenty-one-hexameter tour de force of twenty-nine adynata (rhetorical impossibilites), a poem that excuses his absence from Avignon to his friend Socrates (Ludwig van Kempen) and contextualizes his 1344 residence in Parma within the paradigm of Virgilian pastoral.

In “Petrarchism and Classicism,” Gerhard Regn traces how Pietro Bembo's Aldine edition of the Rime Sparse (1501) and his Prose della Volgar Lingua (set in 1502, but published in 1525) established Petrarch as a vernacular classic. In “Bembo's Rime,” Dietrich Scholler illuminates the classicistic approach of Bembo in emulating Petrarch, and contrasts sonnets by both poets on two central themes: the inaugural awakening of love and the valedictory renunciation of earthly vanities. Florian Schaffenrath's “Silius Italicus and Recent Critics” reviews recent trends in Silian criticism and traces various elements of Virgilian inspiration in the epic Punica. In “Ovidian Moments in Silius Italicus,” Christine Schmittz analyzes how episodes in the Punica reflect etiological passages in the Metamorphoses (Philemon and Baucis; Hercules) and in the Fasti. Christiane Rietz's “Exemplarity in the Punica” notes how Silius Italicus's epic borrows from Valerius Maximus's exempla of great Romans like Scipio, Fabius, and Torquatus.

In “Tasso between Classicism and Modernity,” David Nelting summarizes theoretical issues in reading Tasso's poema epico, with particular emphasis on the Counter-Reformation strictures that constrain the Virgilian aspirations of the Gerusalemme liberata as epic poetry. Nicola Hömke's “Pius culex” interprets the pseudo-Virgilian epyllion about a gnat and a shepherd as a “paraclassicistic,” or creatively parodic, adaptation of passages in Virgil and Ovid. Petra Schierl's “Dynamics of Bucolic Poetry” examines the shepherd-singers in the pastoral tradition from Virgil to Calpurnius in the first century and Nemesianus in the third.

In “Elegiac Poetry of the Cinquecento,” Susanne Friede assesses the elegiac dimension of Petrach's Rime Sparse, and traces their Fortleben in three midcentury canzonieri: Vittoria Colonna's Rime on her late husband Fernando d'Avalos, Michelangelo's fifty epitaphs for his pupil known as Cecchino (Francesco Bracci, who died in 1544 at age sixteen), and Camillo Scroffa's twenty Cantici di Fidenzio, homoerotic laments of the author's tutor for his student. The volume concludes with a cumulative bibliography.

This collection of essays holds many revelations, both textual and theoretical, for students of the classical tradition in ancient Rome and in the Italian Renaissance.