All Scholars

KALLENDORF, Craig William

  • Craig William Kallendorf
  • Date of Birth: June 23, 1954
  • Born City: Cincinnati
  • Born State/Country: OH
  • Parents: Earl Roy, an engineer, & Hazel Greene Griffith K.
  • Date of Death: January 31, 2023
  • Death City: College Station
  • Death State/Country: TX
  • Married: Hilaire Richey, October 16, 1993.
  • Education:

    B.A. Valparaiso U., 1975; M.A., U. North Carolina, 1977; Ph.D. (Comp. Lit.), 1982.
  • Dissertation:

    "Early Humanistic Moral Criticism of Virgil's Aeneid in italy and Great Britain (UNC, 1982).
  • Professional Experience:

    Asst. Prof. English, Texas A&M U., 1982-8; asso. prof. English and Classics, 1988-93; prof. English, Classics and Speech, 1993-2023; interim head, Modern & Classical languages, 2001-4; Cons. NEH, 1987-92; editor, Allegorica, 1989-2000; Rhetorica, 1993-96; Neo-Latin News, 1992—2023; co-editor with Laurence Pernot, International Studies in the History of Rhetoric  (Brill); associates' fellowship, Newberry Library, 1981;Reynolds Foundation fellow in Italy, UNC, 1981; travel grant, South Central Modern Language Association, 1985; Delmas Foundation grant for Venice, 1987; Obert C. and Grace A. Tanner visiting fellowship, University of Utah Humanities Center, 2000–01; grants and fellowships from National Endowment for the Humanities and American Council of Learned Societies.
  • Publications:

    Latin Influences on English Literature from the Middle Ages to the Eighteenth Century. An Annotated Bibliography of Scholarship, 1945-1979 (New York: Garland, 1982); “Cristoforo Landino's Aeneid and the Humanist Critical Tradition,” Renaissance Quarterly 36 (1983) 519-46; Petrarch: Selected Letters, Bryn Mawr Latin Commentaries (Bryn Mawr: Thomas Library, 1986); In Praise of Aeneas: Virgil and Epideictic Rhetoric in the Early Italian Renaissance (Hanover, NH, & London: U. Press of New England, 1989); “Virgilian Scholarship in the Nineties: a Panel Sponsored by the Virgilian Society of America: Nachleben,” Vergilius 36 (1990) 82-100; “Maffeo Vegio's Book XIII to Virgil's Aeneid: a checklist of manuscripts,” with Virginia Brown, Scriptorium 44 (1990) 107-25; “Recent Trends in Vergilian Scholarship,” Helios 18 (1991) 73-82;A Bibliography of Venetian Editions of Virgil: 1470-1599 (Florence: Olschi, 1991); Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans (Bryn Mawr: Thomas Library, 1991); Vergil: The Classical Heritage (New York: Garland, 1993); A Bibliography of Renaissance Italian Translations of Virgil (Florence: Olschki, 1994); With Maria Wells) Aldine Press Books at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center: A Descriptive Catalogue, with Maria Wells, (Austin: U. of Texas Press, 1998); Virgil and the Myth of Venice: Books and Readers in the Italian Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1999); Landmark Essays on Rhetoric and Literature (Mahwah, NJ: Hermagoras Press, 1999); “Rezeptionsgeschichte Comes of Age: der neue Pauly and the Classical Tradition,” IJCT, Part 1: 7 (2000-1) 58-66; Part 2: 11 (2004-5) 292-300; Humanist Educational Treatises, (ed. & trans.), I Tatti Renaissance Library 5 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. Press, 2002); Elogio de Eneas: Virgilio y la retórica epideíctica en el temprano Renacimiento italiano (Santiago de Chile: RIL, 2005); “Marginalia and the Rise of Early Modern Subjectivity,” in On Renaissance Commentaries, ed. Marianne Pade (Hildesheim & Zurich: Olms, 2005), 111-28; “Allusion as Reception: Virgil, Milton, and the Modern Reader,” in Classics and the Use of Reception, ed. Charles Martindale & Richard F. Thomas (Oxford &. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006) 67-79; The Virgilian Tradition: Book History and the History of Reading in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, UK: Variorum, 2007); The Other Virgil: Pessimistic Readings of the Aeneid in Early Modern Culture (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 2007); A Companion to the Classical Tradition (Oxford & Malden MA: Blackwell, 2010); “Catharsis as Exorcism: Aristotle, Tragedy, and Religio-Poetic Liminality,” with Hilaire Kallendorf, Literary Imagination: Published on Behalf of the Association of Literary Scholars,  Critics and Writers 14 (2012) 296-311; “Rhetoric and the Classical Tradition, Twenty Years Afterward: review article,” IJCT 18 (2011-12) 105-11; The Protean Virgil: Material Form and the Reception of the Classics (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 2015); Classics from Papyrus to the Internet: an Introduction to Transmission and Reception,” with Jeffrey M. Hunt, R. Alden Smith, Fabio Stok (Austin: U. of Texas Press, 2017); “The Harvard School and the Problem of History,” CW 111 (2017-18) 84-8; “Canon, Print, and the Virgilian Corpus,” Classical Receptions Journal 10 (2018) 149-69; Classics Transformed, ed. with Giancarlo Abbamonte (Pisa: ETS, 2018); “Uncommon Commonplaces: Melanchthon’s Vergil Commentary and the Paradox of Popularity,” Vergilius 65 (2019) 99-124.

    Festschrift:  Habent Sua Fata Libelli: Studies in Book History, the Classical Tradition, and Humanism in Honor of Craig Kallendorf (Leiden: Brill, 2021).
  • Notes:

    Craig Kallendorf is a figure of the utmost importance in the scholarly developments of the late 20th century that have witnessed the collapse of chronological and other boundaries that once separated the world of classical antiquity from those that followed. For the most part he did this not by entering into exclusive synchronic contact with classical scholars, but by focusing on the early Renaissance always taking as his constant companion Virgil and his classical background, and an abiding interest in rhetoric. 

    His first book was ostensibly, and in reality, a study of ways of reading the Aeneid. Discrete chapters on Petrarch, Boccaccio, Coluccio Salutati, Maffeo Vegio, and Landino, with Dante rarely out of sight, bring out the ways the Virgilian text was filtered through the lens of epideictic rhetoric to reflect on virtue and vice through readings of elements of praise and blame in the ancient port, and, in the case of Vegio, carried over into the creative program of Book 13. 

             When in the 1990s a number of scholars began examining the ambiguity and ambivalence in Virgil, they were accused of bringing post-World War II and Vietnam views about empires and imperialism to their reading of Virgil. Kallendorf posed the question: “If some sort of deep-seated pessimism is a driving force in Virgilian poetry, why did it take nearly two millennia for critics to identify it and insist on its importance? In other words, is the lack of a tradition of pessimistic interpretation not proof that these critics are simply reading their own modern cynicism back into Virgil’s poetry?” While doing full justice to the varied intricacies and to the creative genius of the authors under scrutiny––Petrarch, Boccaccio, Landino, and the others––Kallendorf’s identification of the ethical mandate that literature should praise virtue and chastise vice provides indisputable evidence of the understandings and creative misunderstandings that would become part of the Virgilian baggage to be passed down, particularly in classrooms and Christian educational systems, throughout the centuries.

             The Other Virgil demonstrated the oppositional Virgil in a variety of later Renaissance, and early modern texts from the little-known Filelfo’s Sphortius to the utterly familiar (Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Milton’s Paradise Lost), extending one of the most central Virgilian questions up into the seventeenth century. The Protean Virgil draws from Kallendorf’s deep familiarity with the material evidence that may be detected in the actual manuscripts and printed materials in the Virgilian tradition. This book breaks new ground in giving us not just the writings and readings of the many and varied figures involved in the reception of Virgil.

             Kallendorf’s four bibliographies, produced over a period of thirty years, allow other scholars to profit and continue to profit from this research both on questions of intertextuality in English literature and in the hermeneutical questions that they bring to the textual transmission of Virgil throughout the periods for which Kallendorf has so ably produced the necessary resources.
  • Sources:

    WhAm 58 (2004)  2650.
  • Author: Richard F. Thomas