The Exemplary Hercules

This is the second of four volumes associated with the Hercules Project, all arising from the 2013 and 2017 conferences, with some additional commissioned chapters. These volumes are to appear in the Brill series Metaforms: Studies in the Reception of Classical Antiquity over 2020 and 2021.

The volume The Exemplary Hercules from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment and Beyond covers receptions of the hero in the early-modern period (other than topics which belong in the volumes on the Christian Hercules or on performance). General issues pursued include: the extent to which Hercules was considered to be the incarnation of virtue, and ways in which this might be problematized; continuities and contrasts between representations in different media at different times and in different places; notions of self-fashioning and the undoing of the governmental model; Roman Catholic and Protestant approaches to the pagan model. The volume was published on July 30th 2020. It can be ordered via Brill's website.

Cover image: Hendrik Goltzius, The Farnese Hercules (engraving 42.1 x 30.4 cm, c.1592 but dated 1617), British Museum 1854,0513.104.

Editors: Valerie Mainz (Leeds) and Emma Stafford (Leeds)

Overview of Contents with links to abstracts

Emma Stafford, Preface

Valerie Mainz and Emma Stafford, Introduction: the transmission of a classical tradition in theory and practice

Overview of Contents with links to abstracts

i) Applying the Model of the Princely Ruler

ii) Exploiting the Model

iii) Challenging the Model in the Later Eighteenth Century