"Watching Jessica Wolfe read the Renaissance reading Homer reminds me of why I became a scholar. This beautiful and subtle book will be essential for anyone interested in classical reception - or in the ethical stakes of reading. In our own age of strife, Wolfe teaches us how much we still stand to gain from thinking about poetry." -- Gerard Passannante, Department of English, University of Maryland "Homer and the Question of Strife from Erasmus to Hobbes is a rich, original, and authoritative study that sets a new standard for this topic. Wolfe's work is notable for the sheer abundance and variety of textual material it assembles: translations of Homer, original poetry, commentaries, theological texts, political treatises, medical discourse, moral philosophy, natural philosophy, and more." -- Andrew Escobedo, Department of English, Ohio University

From antiquity through the Renaissance, Homer’s epic poems – the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the various mock-epics incorrectly ascribed to him – served as a lens through which readers, translators, and writers interpreted contemporary conflicts. They looked to Homer for wisdom about the danger and the value of strife, embracing his works as a mythographic shorthand with which to describe and interpret the era’s intellectual, political, and theological struggles.

Homer and the Question of Strife from Erasmus to Hobbes elegantly exposes the ways in which writers and thinkers as varied as Erasmus, Rabelais, Spenser, Milton, and Hobbes presented Homer as a great champion of conflict or its most eloquent critic. Jessica Wolfe weaves together an exceptional range of sources, including manuscript commentaries, early modern marginalia, philosophical and political treatises, and the visual arts. Wolfe’s transnational and multilingual study is a landmark work in the study of classical reception that has a great deal to offer to anyone examining the literary, political, and intellectual life of early modern Europe.

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‘A rich survey of Homeric reception in the Renaissance….  This book will appeal to students of classical reception generally and to Renaissance scholars in particular.’

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‘Among the most wide-ranging and extensively researched publications on classical reception in recent years, Homer and the Question of Strife is a welcome contribution.’

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‘I loved this text, a wonderful read, delightfully informative, and the kind of scholarship to which the academy should aspire.’

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‘The book represents a work of wide-ranging learning and careful delving, and it is a comprehensive study; therefore, it is certainly very useful and valuable to philologists, historians, and Homeric scholars.’

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‘The studies which make up this magnificent, searching book take the reception history of Homer into an unusual grouping of early-modern authors… This book is well produced and edited.’

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"This is a major contribution to all of the fields in which it intervenes, and one that will fundamentally reshape discussions of Homer and classical reception in the Renaissance…This is a book that no scholar of Homer, humanism, intellectual history, classical reception, or translation can afford to be without."