Comments on: 1.19 Literary Joke or Careerism?

By: Paul F. Gehl

Paul F. Gehl — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 15:53:53 +0000

Yes. You are right to point to the oddity (from our point of view) in attacking or defending Terence, studied always in Latin, in the vernacular. Keep in mind, however, that this was part of a much larger debate, in which the Giraldi family as a whole was deeply involved, over the nature of poetry. This debate went on largely in Italian, but necessarily involved the value of classical poetic models, Terence being a standard author. So, in a sense, Terence is not the real subject, though we risk anachronism if we discount how passionate sixteenth-century readers could get about beloved classical authors.

By: MRenihan

MRenihan — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 15:43:45 +0000

So as I understand this, Grasso and Giraldi were conversing in print in the vernacular Italian, which supposes a broad audience. Yet their subject was a series of works written in Latin, and the appropriateness of those works in the curricula of contemporary schools, which would have had a much narrower audience. At first, this makes little sense, for why would you write to a broader audience that may not care about the issue at hand. But if the focus of Grasso (and Giraldi) was not the content of the argument, but the debate itself, this use of the vernacular discussing Terence is understandable.