All Tomorrow's Parties: Greek Banqueting in the Intellectual Culture of the Renaissance

This project investigates the Renaissance revival of an important ancient cultural institution, the Greek 'symposium' or drinking party. At the same time as exposing an understudied genre of Neo-Latin prose writing, the 'convivium' or banquet dialogue, it offers a new perspective on a familiar phenomenon of intellectual history, the 'rebirth of antiquity,' exploring what early modern attempts to recreate the symposium reveal about the formation of secular intellectual identities and social practices in the Renaissance.