Abstract
<JATS1:p>This open access monograph sheds new light on the epic by focusing on its importance as a vector for ideas about Africa and Africans between the 14th and 20th centuries.In Italy and abroad, the 14th-century poet Petrarch’s Italian verse has secured his place in literary history. Yet his greatest triumph was to be crowned in Rome in 1341, ostensibly for his then incomplete Latin epic of the Second Punic War, theAfrica. However, soon after the poem’s posthumous publication, theAfricafell into relative obscurity. The afterlives of the epic remain largely unexplored, particularly with regard to Petrarch’s representation of the Second Punic War and the continent on which Scipio Africanus defeated Hannibal: Africa.</JATS1:p> <JATS1:p>The book also explores the contribution of theAfricato early modern and modern discourses of religion, nation and empire. Samuel Agbamu uncovers the role of theAfricain the intellectual archaeologies of nation, empire and race in the modern era and its role as a vector in the transmission and transformation of Roman ideas of empire and identity as reflected in accounts of the Punic War. This monograph makes its case through fresh close readings of theAfrica, using new methodologies based on Premodern Critical Race Studies and Critical Muslim Studies.</JATS1:p> <JATS1:p>The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the University of Reading.</JATS1:p> <JATS1:p>Petrarch’s fourteenth-century Latin epic about the Second Punic War, the Africa, has been viewed as ‘the birth of Humanism’s dream’. Yet underneath this dream lurks the prefiguration of nightmares which define the Africa’s moment of transition between the Middle Ages and early modernity.</JATS1:p> <JATS1:p>Petrarch’s Africa and its Afterlives explores the ways in which Petrarch conceptualises his historical moment through a poem about a classical subject. The book argues that the Africa contains emergent ideologies that have been seen as constitutive of modernity: a certain historical subjectivity in relation to classical antiquity; the formation of national sensibilities; the secularisation of previously religious categories; and ideologies of race which went on to authorise colonialism, slavery, and genocide. By homing in on particular moments of the epic, through a decolonial and Premodern Critical Race Studies lens, this book shows how the Africa, which enjoyed afterlives far less glorious than Petrarch had hoped, was part of a wholesale reshaping of the horizons of world history. The afterlives of the Africa run deep.</JATS1:p> <JATS1:p>The Africa a fascinating document of a pivotal moment in European culture, a moment at which the classical was repurposed to fit contemporary political concerns. In the case of the Africa, these political concerns were a return of the Papacy to Rome, and a renewal of crusading ideology as a solution to the ills of fourteenth-century Europe. Such a repurposing, this book suggests, can be said to have invented the idea of the classical itself.</JATS1:p>