Profile
Assistant Professor
High Point University, NC
Email: jarthurm@highpoint.edu
Web: highpoint.academia.edu/JacquelineArthurMontagne
Jacqueline Arthur-Montagne is an Assistant Professor at the Department of History, High Point University, engaged in the study of Imperial Greek and Latin literature. She is currently focused on the ancient novels and their relation to the intellectual culture of the Second Sophistic.
“In 2016, I completed my PhD in Classics at Stanford University with a dissertation on “Parodies of Paideia: Prose Fiction and High Learning in the Roman Empire.” This project analyzes the ways in which three prose narratives, the Greek Life of Aesop, the Latin Story of Apollonius of Tyre, and the multilingual Alexander Romancesatirize the core authors of rhetorical education. Aesop, I argue, parodies the maxims of didactic authorities like Aesop, Hesiod, and Menander. Apolloniusreimagines the Carthaginian books of Vergil’s Aeneid, while Alexanderspoofs school declamation themes from Attic oratory and Roman historiography. While classical scholarship often addresses how elite authors of the Imperial period (re)interpreted the classical tradition, this research reveals how similar negotiations with the canon took place at the earliest stages of literary study in the Roman Empire.”
“Although my publications tend more Greek than Latin, my ongoing research into the canon and classical education has resonance with the work of RELICS. Ancient educators and literary critics, from Quintilian to Plutarch, had immense impact on which classical texts and traditions would be transmitted to Western readers in the Medieval and Early Modern periods. To fully appreciate what Latin and Latin literature meant to later readers requires the collaboration of classicists, medievalists, and early modern scholars. Only by studying the nuances of reception and transmission across these periods can we begin to analyze the shape of the classical tradition today and our own engrained attitudes towards Latinitas.”