From Homer to Gutenberg: Ancient Greek and Its Afterlives | Dr David Butterfield | Ralston College

Ralston College Humanities MA: https://www.ralston.ac/humanities-ma?...

David Butterfield is a renowned classicist and Senior Lecturer at the University of Cambridge. His work centres on the critical study and teaching of classical texts.

How did the Renaissance revival of Greek language study transform Western Europe's intellectual landscape and shape our modern understanding of the Classics?

In this talk, delivered on the island of Samos in Greece in August 2023 as part of Ralston College’s Master’s in the Humanities program, Dr David Butterfield—Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Cambridge—charts how Western Europe came to appreciate the language and culture of Ancient Greece as an integral part of its own civilizational inheritance. Dr Butterfield explains that large-scale technological and cultural changes in late antiquity led to a gradual loss of Greek language proficiency—and a waning interest in the pagan world—among Western European intellectual society during the Early Middle Ages. While the Scholasticism of the High Middle Ages was invigorated by the rediscovery of the Greek philosophical tradition, this encounter was mediated almost entirely through Latin translations of Arabic translations of the Greek originals. It was only in the Renaissance, when a renewed appreciation of the Hellenic world on its own terms led to a revitalization of Greek language study, that our contemporary conception of Classics was fully established. Only those ancient works that survived through to the birth of printing in the 15th century were guaranteed an existence into our modern world.

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00:00 Introduction: A Journey through Classical Literature with Dr. Butterfield
06:05 Preservation and Valuation of Greek Culture
08:55 The Evolution of Writing Systems
16:50 Greek Influence on Roman Culture
22:25 The Rise of Christianity and Advances in Book Technology
29:40 Preservation and Transmission of Classical Texts in the Middle Ages
34:50 Arabic Scholars: Preserving Greek Knowledge and Shaping Western Thought
38:00 The Renaissance and Rediscovery of Greek Texts
45:10 Conclusion: The Printing Press and the Spread of Classical Knowledge