The Abbé d'Aubignac's Homer and the Culture of the Street in Seventeenth-Century Paris.

Abstract

This article interprets the abbé d'Aubignac's 1715 Conjectures académiques, ou, Dissertation sur l'Iliade-the first text to posit the non-existence of Homer-in light of the Parisian literary underground of the mid-seventeenth century. It shows that the city's nascent street culture influenced regimes of authorship and, ultimately, classical scholarship on Homer. In general, it argues for a history of scholarship in dialogue with the architecture of the cities where it took place.