Tom Vozar (Exeter): Longinian Sublimity in the Renaissance

While it was once assumed that the Peri hypsous (On the Sublime) of Longinus was all but unknown before the 1674 translation by the French poet-critic Boileau, scholarship of the past few decades has steadily accumulated evidence of the earlier dissemination of the Peri hypsous and its place in Renaissance rhetorical theory and beyond. This paper presents some of my own research on this topic undertaken for my doctoral thesis in progress, Milton and the Idea of the Sublime in the Seventeenth Century, focusing on the various editions of the text produced before 1674 and information about book ownership; my discovery of a previously unknown English translation of Longinus at the British Library, which I have tentatively dated to the 1640s; and the importance of Longinus for Milton.