1.
The responses to Logue showed widespread interest in the Gods, but confusion about their extended mythology.
The godly parts of the Iliad that endure in this tradition are the beginning *in medias res*, the epic hero, and the invocation of the muse.
This lecture will move from the Homeric era through to the Renaissance by telling the story of gods replaced with women.

2.
Jesus' movement offered to combine a messianic movement with an anti-temple movement. This movement sought out non-Jews, wicked people, and the ceremonially unclean (including prostitutes).
Mary Magdalene is called the Apostolum Apostola because she spread the witness of the risen Christ to the Apostles.
St. Helena exposed her son, the emperor Constantine, to Christianity. In 312, Constantine converted during battle. In 313, the Edict of Milan decriminalized Christian worship. (The Roman empire suffered from "barbarian invasions" of Rome, a "migratory period" probably caused by climate change in Europe between 300 and 800. This was mirrored in Saxon England by the Danish and Norman invasions.)
In the early 1300s, Dante Alighieri wrote the "Divine Comedy" (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso) in devotion to a semi-divine love named "Beatrice." The poem attempted to unite Christian theology with classical poetry. The poem has 100 cantos of terza rima (aba bcb cdc).
Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) described the period 300-1300 as the "Dark Ages" because Homeric Greek was entirely unreadable to him. He tried to write an epic titled "Africa," but did not complete it.

3.
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In 1327, Petrarch saw a woman in Avignon named "Laura" on Good Friday. She became the muse for his "Canzoniere." He wrote 366 poems in his "Songbook," the bulk of which are sonnets to Laura. In 1337 he moved to a village nearer to Laura. Laura replaced the classical muse for Petrarch. These poems are not "epic," they don't tell the story of any hero, but instead they tell the story of Petrarch's reflection on Laura.

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In 1522, Henry VIII sent Thomas Wyatt as an ambassador to Rome to secure a divorce from Catherine of Aragon. He brought back the sonnets of Petrarch. Wyatt's sonnets were possibly written to Henry VIII's second wide, Anne Boleyn. When he was imprisoned for this, he certainly used his poetry to court other women.

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Henry Howard was the cousin of both Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, the 2nd and 4th wives of Henry VIII. In 1524 he travelled to France, where he probably encountered Petrarchan sonnets.
Surrey was the first to use blank verse in his translation of the Aeneid.