Bennett Lecture: Rita Copeland, Politics, Ethics, Style: Why Giles of Rome’s 'De regimine principum'?

W. John Bennett Distinguished Visiting PIMS / CMS Scholar Rita Copeland, Sheli Z. and Burton X. Rosenberg Chair in the Humanities and Professor of Classics, English, and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, presents the annual Bennett Lecture, with her talk, "Politics, Ethics, Style: Why Giles of Rome’s 'De regimine principum'?"

Giles of Rome’s 'De regimine principum' (c. 1281) was the most influential and widely diffused “mirror of princes” in the Middle Ages, surviving in nearly 400 manuscripts in Latin and vernacular, and in at least six printings through the early seventeenth century. But why was a work dedicated to a king and aimed at rulers so extraordinarily popular with readers of many different estates? In this lecture I consider this book as a meeting point for different kinds of reading practices and textual cultures: of academic readers who used it alongside the new Aristotelian moral philosophy: of pastoral readers who combed it for homiletic themes; of vernacular readers who valued its pedagogical method and its interface with literary genres; and finally its role in a much larger and long-lived enterprise, the making of vernacular philosophical prose, the “translation” of a philosophical style into vernacular writing.