THE ARTS OF PRAISE: STUDIES ON THE PANEGYRIC

The monograph The Arts of Praise offers a broad overview of the history of the Panegyric, from its Greco-Latin origins to its vernacular heirs of the Golden Age. Taking a comparative approach, throughout twenty-one chapters some of the main features of laudatory writing in the West are outlined. The volume opens with the study of a Hellenistic text that can be considered foundational (the Encomium of Ptolemy, written by the Sicilian bucoliast Theocritus) and concludes with the presentation of a Castilian poem published in Paris in 1705 (the Small Panegyric to the Most Christian Majesty of Louis XIV, by Lorenzo de las Llamosas). Under the direction of Jesús Ponce Cárdenas, the ARELPH project is dedicated to the study of panegyrics from the 16th and 17th centuries. The research team is made up of Hispanic and Latinists from several Spanish centers (U. Complutense, U. de Valladolid, U. de Salamanca, U. de Burgos, U. de León) and European (U. Paris-Sorbonne, École Normale Supérieure). In collaboration with professors from various national centers (U. of Santiago, U. of Cádiz, U. Complutense, U. of Salamanca) and international (U. del Sacro Cuore, U. di Milano, U. di Napoli) this volume analyzes for the first time a representative set of Greco-Roman, Neo-Latin, Italian and Spanish panegyrics.