Honor Faughnan

 PhD research: Honor Faughnan

Flowers of Wisdom: The Survival and Creative Adaptation of Senecan Tragedy in Medieval Christian Collections of Wisdom and Historical Lore

This project seeks to enhance our understanding of how the tragedies of Seneca, famed as the last of the great Classical tragedians and Roman pagan philosophers, came to occupy such a central position in the European dramatic tradition. This will be achieved through an analysis of how Seneca’s tragedies were reconceived and popularised as a repository of wisdom and historical lore in the medieval period.

According to the traditional scholarly view, Seneca’s dramatic works were lost during Late Antiquity (c. 250-600 CE) before being rediscovered during the Renaissance, from which point on they had a far-reaching influence on European theatre (Schubert 2014, 76; Dodson-Robinson 2016, 1). The research question which this project seeks to answer is: what happened to Senecan tragedy in the near-millennium between the period of loss and the period of so-called “rediscovery”? This research will move the scholarly discourse forward by showing that, far from being lost, Seneca’s tragedies were creatively adapted in the intervening period.

In particular, it will examine the medieval tradition of “mining” (Grund 2015, 104) Seneca’s plays for short passages of moral wisdom to be curated in mini-encyclopaedias called “florilegia” (“collections of flowers”) as evidence of a deep, learned engagement with the tragedies and their depiction of profound human suffering. While the florilegia tradition “remains poorly studied and poorly understood” (Clarke 2014, 135), it was because of these "libraries-in-miniature” (Franklin-Brown 2012, 6) that Seneca’s tragedies remained relevant and continued to circulate during periods when access to the complete tragedies would have been rare.

Central to this research will be a detailed study of the early-13th-century manuscript known as Exeter, Cathedral Library 3549B. Using the methodological tools of New Philology, this study will provide the first analysis of the unique combination of florilegia-style quotations and complete play-text from Seneca’s tragedies curated in the Exeter manuscript.

E-mail: h.faughnan1@universityofgalway.ie
Supervisor: Professor Michael Clarke
Funding: Hardiman Research Scholarship (2025-2029)

Research area: the Latin tradition