Apollo, the classical god of poetry, truth, light, and the healing arts, held a special fascination for poets and scholars in the late-medieval period. As the English vernacular gained literary prestige in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, poets harnessed the precedent and authority of classical antiquity in order to grant themselves historical legitimacy. Uniquely positioned at the junctures of Latin and vernacular, pagan and Christian, human and divine, the figure of Apollo emerged as an impetus for change in the period's creative re-conceptualization of artistic identity and...
Apollo, the classical god of poetry, truth, light, and the healing arts, held a special fascination for poets and scholars in the late-medieval per...