Chapter 6 shows how Cicero establishes a normative framework for the writing of literary history. Across the dialogue and through the various speakers he offers a sustained critique of literary historiography. Several fundamental tensions and conflicts emerge: absolute versus relative criteria in assessing literature and building canons; presentism and antiquarianism; formalism and historicism; and the recognition that all literary histories are subject to their crafters’ emphases and agendas.

Chapter 6 shows how Cicero establishes a normative framework for the writing of literary history. Across the dialogue and through the various speakers he offers a sustained critique of literary historiography. Several fundamental tensions and conflicts emerge: absolute versus relative criteria in assessing literature and building canons; presentism and antiquarianism; formalism and historicism; and the recognition that all literary histories are subject to their crafters’ emphases and agendas.

The Council of Nicaea was a landmark event, yet uncertainty surrounds almost every aspect of the council and its proceedings. No Acts survive, the signatory lists are incomplete, and the organization of the council’s meetings and the identities and motivations of those who participated remain controversial. Rather than propose another hypothetical reconstruction, the aim of this chapter is to reconsider the different interpretations made possible by our limited evidence and the particular questions that have divided scholarly opinion. Who attended the council? Who took the leading roles in the council’s deliberations? And who proposed and supported the crucial decisions, such as the inclusion of the contested term homoousios into the Nicene Creed? Not only are such questions essential to understanding the council and its legacy, but our search for answers offers the opportunity to look beyond the emperor Constantine and the most famous episcopal protagonists, and consider the significance of Nicaea for some of the less prominent figures who contributed to the drama. While their voices are difficult to hear, these more humble individuals had their own parts to play and shared the contemporary awe at a spectacle that symbolized the changing status of Christianity within the fourth-century Roman empire.

After the First Crusade, which resulted in the conquest of Jerusalem, the shrines in the Holy Land fell into the hands of the western Latin crusaders. Most of them, especially those located in large cathedral churches, were given by the Latin authorities to new foundations of Latin canons following the Rule of Augustine, which was the norm for cathedrals in the West. This chapter examines in turn the major communities of Augustinian canons, beginning with the most important shrine, the Holy Sepulchre, and also considering the Templum Domini, Mt Zion, the Mount of Olives, Bethlehem, Nazareth and others. The circumstances of foundation, the manner in which the communities were governed and the important role they played as major landowners in the Crusader States provide the main approach to the chapter.

This chapter looks at the upper echelon of power in the church of St Omer, examining the system of patronage that controlled and regulated it and the ways in which that control affected the careers of musicians. It does this by means of a close examination of the careers of three well-placed individuals in the church’s governing chapter. Its primary focus is on Nicolas Rembert, canon and later dean, and a former singer in St Peter’s, Rome. Rembert was a consummate church politician who exercised his legal and political skill in Rome to provide canonries for prominent singers and support music by means of income from a St Omer canonry suppressed through his influence. His period as dean also saw the bringing-in of important musical figures including the copyist and celebrated composer Jean Mouton. The other two central figures in the chapter, both members of the Burgundian court chapel, show the close relationship with the ruling regional dynasty and the contrasting effects it could have on church personnel and politics.

The changing market for rare books forms the focus of this chapter, looking at the impact of the French Revolution not just on the dispersed libraries of the old regime, but the emergence of new ways of classifying and consuming historic editions. It identifies the expanded market for rare books from the 1790s: both the resourceful dealers who were able to exploit the demand for works by historic printing houses, and the restless bibliophiles who scavenged across the city on the hunt for rare editions. It reconsiders why this period saw the rise of the so-called bibliomaniac, as well as the growth in new ways to classify rare books (via bibliography) and new forms of bibliophile sociability. Touching on key figures such as Charles Nodier, Guilbert de Pixéricourt, Antoine-Augustin Renouard and Arthur-Marie-Henri Boulard, the chapter argues for a mode of book collecting that was self-consciously anachronistic, seeking to celebrate the pre-revolutionary world of elite learning.

This chapter turns to Propertius and Philip Sidney and, taking its cue from from Cynthia as the eroticised muse of Propertian poetry, and the scornful muse of Astrophil and Stella 1, explores metaliterary themes of poetic practice. Reading the muse as a figure for ideas of inspiration and creativity, for authority and canonicity, we consider how the selected texts negotiate, articulate and configure ideas about the nature, identity and cultural function of poetry in Augustan Rome and Elizabethan England.