| Popis: |
This chapter explores how Petrarch responded to earlier arguments about imitatio, and how that relates to his unfinished epic Africa. It begins by showing how the metaphors used to describe imitation in the rhetorical tradition were deployed in the self-representations of humanist scholars who rediscovered a complete text of Quintilian. Petrarch’s own richly metaphorical discussions of imitatio are then connected with his concerns about verbal appropriation, and it is argued that Petrarch’s self-representations as a heroic rediscoverer of lost texts should not be taken at face value. He was adept at borrowing from late antique sources—Macrobius in particular—and at occluding those debts. His incomplete epic poem Africa shows how he sought to imitate without borrowing phrases longer than two words from an earlier work. Petrarch’s concerns about plagiarism led him to ‘imitate’ texts which were known about but lost, such as Ennius’s Annales. Imitating such texts—termed here ‘the lost imitand’—was a powerful means of establishing a distinction between imitation and textual appropriation, since a text which was lost could be reimagined, but it could not be plagiarized. |
