Rethinking Ancient Aesthetics

Rethinking Ancient Aesthetics (RAA) is an online workshop series dedicated to examining and challenging Eurocentric aesthetic ideals. The study of ancient aesthetics has traditionally been dominated by attention to Aristotle and Plato, and most publications in this area focus on Greek literary and philosophical sources. Following Dan-el Padilla Peralta’s recent provocation that the field of classics is frequently overrepresented as the dominant and even sole means of determining aesthetic value (Classicism and Other Phobias, Princeton 2025), this series seeks to expand awareness of the diversity of ancient judgements regarding the value of art and literature in society.

Workshop speakers typically share a pre-circulated manuscript (recently published, forthcoming, or in-progress) for discussion with a respondent and an audience of network members and other scholars. We are especially interested in curating a program that examines not only Roman aesthetic theory, still an understudied topic in comparison with Greek sources, but also non-European ancient and pre-modern aesthetic values, including non-textual evidence. If you are interested in presenting, please reach out.

Registration is required to receive readings and meeting links. For more information, email Rebecca Moorman (moorman@bu.edu) or Lorenza Bennardo (lorenza.bennardo@utoronto.ca).

Spring 2027 Schedule

January 25: Cat Lambert (Cornell), “Martial’s umbilical poetics”. Respondents: Luke Roman (MUN) and Stephanie Seed (MIT). Registration link coming soon.

One of the material features of the ancient book that distinguishes the ancient reading experience from our own today is the umbilicus, the wooden rod around which the papyrus scroll was wound. The umbilicus has long been of interest to historians of the book but has received little literary attention. It is easy for us to unsee the umbilicus because the material formats in which we routinely encounter classical texts—the codex or digital interfaces—do not possess an equivalent feature. To put it simply, as literary scholars, we are accustomed to make meaning from texts by reading with our eyes and not with our hands.

In this paper, I explore the role of the umbilicus in Martial, whose textual corpus features more umbilici than all extant Latin literature combined. I argue that Martial mobilizes the materiality of the umbilicus as well as its literary pedigree (from Catullus onwards) to develop a novel poetics of the book’s navel that is core to understanding his distinctive poetics of reading and the book. Martial’s “umbilical poetics” illuminates the poet’s paradoxical literary aesthetics and generates new ways of reading (and handling) Martial’s books.

March: Emma Mendez Correa (NYU). More details coming soon.

April: James Zainaldin (Vanderbilt). More details coming soon.