The aim of my project is a diachronic examination of dedicatory prose prefaces to Greek and Latin texts from the Classical period to the Principate. Dedications allowed an author to directly address a specific, named dedicatee and to implicate him as a participant in a communicative act; as such, they represented a form of the social practices of gift exchange, networking, and patronage. The presentation of the relationship between an author and a dedicatee played an important function in the former’s self-creation and allowed him to comment on the process of writing, to signal his motivation and inspirations, and to shape readers’ expectations. The figure of the dedicatee, on the other hand, served as a model reader and encouraged a specific type of intellectual processing of the text. In this project, I will collect evidence on the development of dedicatory prefaces in the form of extant texts, fragments, and testimonies. I will create a typology and comparative overview of dedicatory conventions and interpret their literary and rhetorical functions.
Project title:
An Author to his Reader. Dedicatory Prose Prefaces in Ancient Literature
Area of research:
Ancient Greek and Roman Literature
Fellowship period:
1 Aug 2020 - 31 Jul 2023
Fellowship type:
AIAS-COFUND II Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow
This fellowship has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 754513 and The Aarhus University Research Foundation.
