The 2016 series of Blackwell-Bristol lectures took place on 3, 4, 9, and 11 May and were given by Professor Glenn Most, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa.

Refractions of Authority: Intertextual Strategies in the Appendix Vergiliana

Professor Most spoke eloquently about the liminal positioning of the Appendix Vergiliana vis-à-vis the canonicity of Virgil’s known works. He maintained that despite the former’s dubious provenance in antiquity, it was, according to our speaker, a way of inadvertently talking about the reception of Virgil himself. Thus the title and central theme of the lectures focused on how at least some of the poems in the Appendix can be considered a type of homage to Virgil, rather than simple imitation or forgery, and which, when considered in this light, demonstrate an uncomfortable and at times paradoxical relationship with the figure of Virgil.

• Lecture 1: 'Canon and Closure: Virgil's Text and the Appendix Vergiliana' (Respondent: Professor Stephen Harrison, Oxford University);
• Lecture 2: 'Forging a Poetic Autobiography: The Culex' (Respondent: Dr Tom Geue, University of St. Andrews);
• Lecture 3: 'The Poetry of Truth: The Aetna' (Respondent: Professor Philip Hardie, Cambridge University);
• Lecture 4: 'Citation and Metamorphosis: The Ciris' (Respondent: Dr Genevieve Liveley, University of Bristol).

Glenn W. Most (Pisa and Chicago), studied Classics and Comparative Literature in the US (Harvard, Yale) and Europe (Oxford, Tübingen), and has taught at the Universities of Yale, Princeton, Michigan, Siena, Innsbruck, Heidelberg, and Paris. Since 1996 he has been a regular Visiting Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and since 2001 he has been simultaneously Professor of Greek Philology at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa; he is also an External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. He has published numerous articles and books on Classics, on the history and methodology of Classical studies, on the Classical tradition and Comparative Literature, on literary theory, history of art, modern philosophy, and literature. He is currently completing a nine-volume Greek and English Loeb edition of the early Greek philosophers (co-edited with André Laks), a bilingual edition of the complete corpus of ancient and mediaeval scholia and commentaries to Hesiod’s Theogony (co-edited with Hugo Koning), and a volume comparing philological techniques in a variety of Western and Eastern traditions (co-edited with Anthony Grafton).