The Choice of Odysseus Homeric Ethics in Renaissance Epic and Opera

The Choice of Odysseus demonstrates how the Odyssey provided Renaissance authors and readers with a poetic ethics—tools for living developed in poetry—to navigate the challenges of their age. As they endured schisms, ruptures, and failures of ideals, readers and poets turned to the Odyssey for narratives of recovery and aftermath. Sarah Van der Laan reconstructs Renaissance readings of the Odyssey from myriad sources. Situating major works by Petrarch, Poliziano, Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, Monteverdi, and Milton in these Odyssean contexts, she recovers a powerful Renaissance tradition of Odyssean epic. Renaisance poets adopted the Odyssey as an epic model that supplements and even opposes the Virgilian epic model of conquest and imperial foundation. For Renaissance readers and authors, the Odyssey renders heroic other kinds of lived experience: the necessity of facing the world and its challenges with only human wisdom and reason; the ability to integrate traumatic detours and reversals into a vision of a successful and accomplished self; the recovery of a private life and personal desires painfully suspended for public service. Emphasizing marriage, reconciliation, homecoming, and the return to private life and private desires as suitably heroic matter for epic and powerful conventions for narrative and poetic closure, the Renaissance Odyssey and the epics and operas it inspired confer a uniquely heroic status on experience for men and women alike.

Sarah Van der Laan, Indiana University

Sarah Van der Laan is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University. She received her PhD in Renaissance Studies and English from Yale University and worked as a maître-assistante suppléante in the Département de langue et littérature anglaises of the Université de Genève before moving to Bloomington. Her teaching and research focus on the European epic tradition from Homer to Milton and on Renaissance literature, music, and culture, with special interests in the ethical value of literature, Renaissance epic and romance, Homeric reception, the intersections of epic and opera, and the place of music in the literary tradition.