Research Talk by Andrew Wallace

The Fact of Rome

This talk explores a series of expressions of ancient Rome’s nearness and availability to those who lived in its wake in Medieval and early modern England. In writers ranging from Medieval monks, such as Gildas and Bede, to Edmund Spenser, Sir Thomas Browne, and John Milton, encounters with the fact of Rome are interpretable as encounters with the self made strange and as meditations on the order of the ordinary.