DEPARTMENT OF CLASSICS AND ANCIENT HISTORY
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About the department
Research
Charles Martindale
Professor of Latin, Dean of the Faculty of Arts
Phone: +44 (0)117 928 8258
E-mail: c.a.martindale@bristol.ac.uk
Research
Professor Martindale’s research interests are wide-ranging, with a particular commitment to cross-disciplinary research. He is interested in Latin poetry (particularly Catullus, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Lucan), and its reception, especially in English literature (he has edited collections on the reception history of the three great Augustan poets, Virgil and his Influence, Ovid Renewed, and Horace Made New). He has written extensively on Shakespeare’s and Milton’s engagement with antiquity. His book Redeeming the Text, on reception theory and the classics, helped to set the agenda for what has become the fastest growing area of the discipline; and he has recently co-edited with Professor Richard Thomas of Harvard University a collection of essays designed to carry the debate forward (Classics and the Uses of Reception). He was awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship to write a monograph Latin Poetry and the Judgement of Taste arguing for the importance of beauty and the aesthetic in our response to the arts. His work thus covers Classics, English, Comparative Literature, Critical Theory, and Aesthetics; other concerns include translation and translation theory, autobiographical writing and the personal voice, and theories of reading and criticism. Most recently, together with Professor David Hopkins of the Bristol English Department, he has been asked by Oxford University Press to be overall editor of a 5-volume Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, one of the largest projects in literary reception ever undertaken.
Professor Martindale welcomes applications from prospective research students planning to work on topics related to any of the above areas. Examples of PhDs he has supervised are: Ovidian influences on English Literature; Virgil’s Presence in 20th-Century France; Landscape and the Eclogues; Catullus and his Reception.
Teaching
Professor Martindale teaches units on Latin language and literature and on reception and approaches to reading.
Selected publications
- with Richard Thomas, eds, Classics and the Uses of Reception (Blackwell, 2006)
- Latin Poetry and the Judgement of Taste: An Essay in Aesthetics (OUP, 2005)
- with A. B. Taylor, eds, Shakespeare and the Classics (CUP, 2004)
- ‘Classics, Theory, and Thought’, Arion 10 (2002) 141-155
- with Sarah Annes Brown, edition of Nicholas Rowe’s translation of Lucan’s Pharsalia (Everyman, 1998)
- ed., The Cambridge Companion to Virgil (CUP, 1997)
- Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception (Roman Literature and its Contexts) (CUP, 1993)
- with Michelle Martindale, Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity: An Introductory Essay (Routledge, 1990, pb 1994)
- John Milton and the Transformation of Ancient Epic (Croom Helm, 1986, repr. Bristol Classical Press, 2002)