Call for Papers, APA 2014

Virgil Commentaries:  La Cerda to Horsfall
Organizer:  Richard Thomas
Sponsored by the Vergilian Society

In his 2012 commentary on Aeneid 12 Richard Tarrant notes that La Cerda’s 1642 Virgil commentary has, particularly since it has become available online, been recognized “as a work of an engaged and often acute interpreter.” If La Cerda’s work may be seen as the most important early post-Renaissance attempt, rooted in some of the texts of what Ziolkowski and Putnam collected in The Vergilian Tradition, to explicate the text of this poet, we might ask why and how this enterprise has continued and evolved across the almost four centuries since La Cerda, soon to culminate in the forthcoming fifth single-book commentary by Nicholas Horsfall, on Aeneid 6.

The Vergilian Society would like to sponsor a panel devoted to papers exploring any aspect of this topic across the whole oeuvre of Virgil. Proposals might focus on specific commentaries, specific periods and the way the interests of those periods intersect with the commentaries, or on any number of critical issues whose journey across, and reception in, centuries of commentaries might be of interest. Papers on multi-book school commentaries (Page, Williams, etc.) are as welcome as those on more scholarly productions, from Cambridge Green and Yellows to Oxford Reds and Blues, and to the larger commentaries of Brill and de Gruyter.

Abstracts of 500 to 800 words, suitable for a 15-20 minute presentation, should be sent to by email to Richard Thomas at rthomas@fas.harvard.edu.  Prof. Thomas can also be contacted at the Department of the Classics, Harvard University, 206 Boylston Hall, Cambridge, MA 02138; tel. 617 496-6061.  Since all abstracts will be judged anonymously, please do not identify yourself in any way on the abstract page.  All proposals must be received by February 1, 2013 and should be sent to Prof. Thomas electronically as email attachments.