Class, Gender, and the Virgilian Myth

Abstract As we have seen, those who bought and read a Latin edition of Virgil in Renaissance Venice tended to approach the text with several concerns uppermost in their minds. When their interest in Virgil came from the institutional environment of the schools, they tended to concentrate on the moral content of the poetry, to hear in it exhortations to work hard for God, country, and what they knew to be right and to accept what could not be changed as part of the ultimate justice of an ordered universe. As Christians, Virgil’s Venetian readers also struggled throughout the Renaissance to integrate his poetry into their own religious life through the concept of theologia poetica. These moral and religious concerns emerged naturally as Virgil was read in accordance with the prevailing intellectual and political paradigm of the day, such that in this time and place Virgil can only be understood in relation to the myth of Venice.