Education

Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1982

M.A., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1977

B.A., Valparaiso University, 1975

Publications

Kallendorf, Craig.  The Portean Virgil.  Oxford University Press, 2015

The Protean Virgil argues that when we try to understand how and why different readers have responded differently to the same text over time, we should take into account the physical form in which they read the text as well as the text itself. Using Virgil’s poetry as a case study in book history, the volume shows that a succession of material forms – manuscript, printed book, illustrated edition, and computer file – undermines the drive toward textual and interpretive stability. This stability is the traditional goal of classical scholarship, which seeks to recover what Virgil wrote and how he intended it to be understood.

Kallendorf, Craig.  A Catalogue of the Junius Spencer Morgan Collection of Virgil in the Princeton University Library.  Oak Knoll Press, 2009.

The Junius Spencer Morgan collection at Princeton University consists of over 700 titles (totaling around 900 volumes) of editions of the Roman poet Virgil (70-19 BC), in Latin and in various vernacular languages. Technically the collection includes items ranging from the first printed edition (Rome, 1469) to the present, but the focus is strongly on material published in the early modern period.

Kallendorf, Craig.  The Books of Venice Il Libro Veneziano.  Oak Knoll Press, 2009.

The Books of Venice (Il libro veneziano) contains a series of essays (in English and Italian) exploring Venetian book history from the Quattrocento through current production, books printed “in the shadow of Aldus Manutius.” Venice’s books, like her art and architecture, have long been considered one of her greatest glories. Some of the earliest printers in Italy were Venetian, and Venice remained one of the world’s premier book producers through the sixteenth century.

Kallendorf, Craig.  The Virgilian Tradition: Book History and the History of Reading in Early Modern Europe.

The essays in this collection approach the reception of the Roman poet Virgil in early modern Europe from the perspective of two areas at the center of current scholarly work in the humanities: book history and the history of reading. The first group of essays uses Virgil’s place in post-classical culture to raise questions of broad scholarly interest: How, exactly, does modern reception theory challenge traditional notions of literary practice and value? How do the marginal comments of early readers provide insight into their character and mind? How does rhetoric help shape literary criticism?

Kallendorf, Craig. The Other Virgil.

The Other Virgil tells the story of how a classic like the Aeneid can say different things to different people. As a school text it was generally taught to support the values and ideals of a succession of post-classical societies, but between 1500 and 1800 a number of unusually sensitive readers responded to cues in the text that call into question what the poem appears to be supporting. This book focuses on the literary works written by these readers, to show how they used the Aeneid as a model for poems that probed and challenged the dominant values of their society, just as Virgil had done centuries before.