Reception — a new humanism? Receptivity, pedagogy, the transhistorical

Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception (hereafter RTT), whose twentieth anniversary falls in 2013, was designed in the main as a theoretical intervention. It mounted an argument — against what are often, if not wholly satisfactorily, termed ‘positivistic’ modes of enquiry — about how classical texts mean and how they may most profitably be interpreted, an argument that was at first fiercely resisted, though later, with the book’s growing respectability, more often ignored. In the event the principal impact of RTT proved instead to be institutional, as it contributed to a major reconfiguration of Classics as a discipline, at least in the UK; a growth in classical reception studies has been one of the most notable features of the past twenty years. By now the battle for taking reception seriously within Classics has long been won, significantly with ‘reception’ as the key term, the word of power, which has not been the case, at least to the same degree, elsewhere within the humanities. The signs of institutional success are everywhere. Rather bizarrely, ‘reception’ is included as a category within what we must now learn to call the Research Excellence Framework (formerly the Research Assessment Exercise) — as though reception were a subdisciplinary field of Classics, like Latin literature or ancient visual culture, which in my view is not the case. There is the journal within which I am writing, wholly devoted to classical reception studies. There are