This wide-ranging study examines how writers from the fifteenth century onwards explored themes and concerns central to Virgil's Aeneid. Examining an array of poems and one play (Shakespeare's Tempest), some very well known and others much less so, K. explains how the Aeneid acts as a significant model for them. Moreover, he argues that these works express anxiety about the exercise of power by generals, colonisers, imperialists, heroes, politicians, monarchists and other potential oppressors of the Other. This, K. argues, indicates that readers of the Aeneid from the early modern period and beyond could and sometimes did see a potential for ‘pessimism’ in it, despite the fact that the mainstream interpretation of the epic was otherwise. The book demonstrates that the Aeneid was no more univocal in previous centuries than it is today.

The introduction gives an overview of the centuries-long centrality of the Aeneid in the education system, and discusses how this conservative and authoritarian system encouraged and reinforced an understanding of Virgil's work as pro-imperial. This is, as K. concludes, ‘a Virgil whose language and sentiments encoded power and privilege, who provided the model for imperial expansion … and who served to defend the Ancien Régime against any threat to its political, economic and cultural hegemony’ (p. 13). It is against this grain that the authors K. is interested in wrote, and perhaps, then, it is small surprise that several of their efforts proved to be what he terms ‘failures’.

The subject of the first major section is one such ‘failure’: Francesco Filelfo's Sphortias, an epic about Francesco Sforza's rise to power in fifteenth-century Milan. K. argues that it has not been given fair treatment, primarily because it has been seen as a clumsy and shameless attempt to flatter its hero. In support of this maligned text, K. first briefly discusses a number of works written in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy which show that Filelfo and several of his contemporaries did not see Aeneas as a model of perfection and regarded the ending of the Aeneid, where the hero succumbs to ira and furor, as particularly problematic. He then turns to the Sphortias and its Aeneas-like hero. His reading stresses Sforza's less than heroic qualities that qualify the countless ‘flattering adjectives’ (p. 63) associated with him: he has moments of emotional weakness and impiety; he is motivated by battle frenzy and encourages his soldiers by appealing to their greed; he fails to prevent his rampaging troops from committing numerous atrocities; he is compared to the black plague, and said to be so malleable as to have a mind softer than Sicilian beeswax (pp. 50–63). K. is more generous to Filelfo than most previous scholars: rather than characterising the epic as inept, he sees its author as a marginalised man, who could not help allowing the perspective of the Other to colour his writing, as it coloured his reading of the Aeneid.

The approach taken here is characteristic of the rest of the book. K. carefully surveys the state of scholarship on both the Aeneid and the texts he discusses, provides detailed background about the cultural milieu in which the authors were writing, and the views on Virgil which they and their contemporaries held, before in-depth analysis of their debts to the Aeneid and the ‘pessimism’ perceptible in their work. Whether discussing an epic about the Spanish campaigns in South America, Shakespeare's Tempest, the lyric poetry of a sixteenth-century Mexican nun, Milton's Paradise Lost, a frequently derided epic about Christopher Columbus, or a French travesty of the first six books of the Aeneid suppressed by Napoleon's censors, K. makes his case clearly and is careful not to overstate it. In showing how the Aeneid reverberates through the voices of resistance audible in the texts, he has opened new ground in the study of Virgilian reception, both building on the work other scholars have done on individual texts and most importantly suggesting trends that unite these texts and their scholarship. In bringing together discussion of such an impressive range of literature, this volume provides a solid foundation and encouragement for further work on these texts and others like them.