A GUIDE TO NEO-LATIN LITERATURE

Latin was for many centuries the common literary language of

Europe, and Latin literature of immense range, stylistic power and
social and political significance was produced throughout Europe
and beyond from the time of Petrarch (c. 1400) well into the
eighteenth century. This is the first available work devoted specific
ally to the enormous wealth and variety of neo Latin literature, and
offers essential background to the understanding of this material, in
twenty three chapters written by leading scholars sixteen of which
are devoted to individual forms. Each contributor relates a wide
range of fascinating but now little known texts to the handful of
more familiar Latin works of the period, such as Thomas More’s
Utopia, Milton’s Latin poetry and the works of Petrarch and Erasmus.
All Latin is translated throughout the volume.

victoria moul is Senior Lecturer in Latin Language and Litera

ture at King’s College London. She is a leader in the field of early
modern Latin and English literature, with wide ranging publica
tions including articles on neo Latin elegy, lyric and didactic poetry
and Milton, Jonson, Donne and Cowley, as well as the reception
of Horace, Pindar and Virgil. Her previous publications include
Jonson, Horace, and the Classical Tradition (Cambridge, 2010) and
a translation of George Herbert’s complete Latin poetry with intro
duction and notes, for a new edition of Herbert edited with John
Drury (George Herbert: Complete Poems, 2015). She is working on an
anthology of neo Latin verse, with commentary, and a major book
on the interaction between neo Latin and English poetry in Britain,
1550 1700.
 A GUIDE TO
NEO-LATIN LITERATURE

e di t e d by
VICTORIA MOUL
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title: A guide to Neo-Latin literature / [editor,] Victoria Moul.
description: Cambridge, United Kingdom : Cambridge University Press, 2017. |
Includes bibiographical references.
identifiers: lccn 2016023662 | isbn 9781107029293 (Hardback)
subjects: lcsh: Latin literature, Medieval and modern–History and criticism.
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For David, Joseph and Felix
 Contents

Illustrations page x
Contributors xi
List of Neo-Latin Authors and Dates xvii
Acknowledgements xxviii

Introduction 1
Victoria Moul

part i ideas and assumptions 15

1. Conjuring with the Classics: Neo-Latin Poets and Their
Pagan Familiars 17
Yasmin Haskell
2. Neo-Latin Literature and the Vernacular 35
Tom Deneire
3. How the Young Man Should Study Latin Poetry: Neo-Latin
Literature and Early Modern Education 52
Sarah Knight
4. The Republic of Letters 66
Françoise Waquet

part ii poetry and drama 81

5. Epigram 83
Robert Cummings
6. Elegy 98
L. B. T. Houghton

vii
viii Contents
7. Lyric 113
Julia Haig Gaisser
8. Verse Letters 131
Gesine Manuwald
9. Verse Satire 148
Sari Kivistö
10. Pastoral 163
Estelle Haan
11. Didactic Poetry 180
Victoria Moul
12. Epic 200
Paul Gwynne
13. Drama 221
Nigel Griffin

part iii prose 235

14. Approaching Neo-Latin Prose as Literature 237
Terence Tunberg
15. Epistolary Writing 255
Jacqueline Glomski
16. Oratory and Declamation 272
Marc Van der Poel
17. Dialogue 289
Virginia Cox
18. Shorter Prose Fiction 308
David Marsh
19. Longer Prose Fiction 322
Stefan Tilg
20. Prose Satire 340
Joel Relihan
21. Historiography 358
Felix Mundt
 Contents ix
part iv working with neo-latin literature 377
22. Using Manuscripts and Early Printed Books 379
Craig Kallendorf
23. Editing Neo-Latin Literature 394
Keith Sidwell

Bibliography 408
Index 474
 Illustrations

Figure 17.1 – Hans Burgkmair the Elder, woodcut from frontispiece of

Politiae literariae Angeli Decembrii Mediolanensis oratoris
clarissimi, ad summum pontificem Pium II, libri septem
(Augsburg: Heinrich Steiner, 1540). page 295

x
 Contributors

virginia cox is Professor of Italian Studies at New York University. She

is the author of The Renaissance Dialogue (Cambridge, 1992); Women’s
Writing in Italy, 1400–1650 (2008); The Prodigious Muse: Women’s Writing
in Counter-Reformation Italy (2011); and A Short History of the Italian
Renaissance (2015).

robert cummings (1942–2015) was a scholar of the English, Scottish,

and European Renaissance whose interests ranged far and wide. In recent
years he co-edited volume ii (1550–1660) of The Oxford History of Literary
Translation in English, won the BCLA/BCLT (now ‘John Dryden’) Trans-
lation Prize for his English translations of George Herbert’s Latin Poems,
edited Robert Graves’ versions of Apuleius, Suetonius and Lucan, and
served as Review Editor for the journal Translation and Literature. Robert,
sadly, died before he was able to oversee the final stages of editing, and
some details of his chapter were completed by the editor.

tom deneire, Ph.D. (2009), Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, researched

(neo-) Latin epistolography and stylistics at that university, and partici-
pated in an NWO (Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research)
project on bilingual humanist poetry at the Huygens ING Institute (The
Hague). In 2014 he was appointed Curator of the Special Collections of
Antwerp University Library, where he leads cataloguing, exhibition and
digitization projects. He is editor of De Gulden Passer, international journal
for book history.

julia haig gaisser is Eugenia Chase Guild Professor Emeritus in the

Humanities and Research Professor in Latin at Bryn Mawr College. Her
books include Catullus and His Renaissance Readers (1993), Pierio Valeriano

xi
xii List of Contributors
on the Ill Fortunes of Learned Men (1999), The Fortunes of Apuleius and the
Golden Ass (2008), and Catullus (2009). Her translation of the first volume
of Pontano’s Dialogues was published in 2012; she is now working on
volume ii.

jacqueline glomski is Senior Research Fellow in the History Depart-

ment at King’s College London. She is the author of Patronage and
Humanist Literature in the Age of the Jagiellons (2007), a co-compiler (with
Erika Rummel) of the Annotated Catalogue of Early Editions of Erasmus at
the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies (1994), co-editor (with
A. Steiner-Weber and K. A. E. Enenkel, et al.) of Acta Conventus Neo-
Latini Monasteriensis: Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Congress
of Neo-Latin Studies (2015) and (with Isabelle Moreau) of Seventeenth-
Century Fiction: Text and Transmission (2016), as well as the author of
numerous articles on the neo-Latin literature of the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries. She is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a fellow
of the Society of Antiquaries.

nigel griffin taught at the universities of Manchester and Oxford. He

now lives in south-west France.

paul gwynne is Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Studies at The

American University of Rome. He received his Ph.D. from the Warburg
Institute, University of London. Areas of research focus on late fifteenth-
and early sixteenth-century Italy; the rise and diffusion of Italian Human-
ism. These interests are reflected in a number of articles and chapters in
books as well as a trilogy of monographs which review the production of
neo-Latin poetry in Rome, 1480–1600: Poets and Princes: the Panegyric
Poetry of Johannes Michael Nagonius (2013); Patterns of Patronage in Renais-
sance Rome. Francesco Sperulo: Poet, Prelate, Soldier, Spy (2015) and Fran-
cesco Benci and the Rise of Jesuit Epic (forthcoming). The latter volume will
include a complete edition, with translation and commentary of Benci’s
epic Quinque Martyres, and discuss Jesuit epic in a global context.

estelle haan is Professor of English and Neo-Latin Studies at The

Queen’s University of Belfast. She has authored/edited thirteen books on
the neo-Latin poetry of Milton, Marvell, Gray, Addison, Vincent Bourne,
and William Dillingham, and has edited Milton’s Latin poetry for The
 List of Contributors xiii
Complete Works of John Milton, volume iii. She has recently completed an
edition of Milton’s Latin letters for The Complete Works of John Milton,
volume xi, and is currently working on an authored book entitled Sur-
prised by Syntax: Reading the Latinity of Paradise Lost.

yasmin haskell, FAHA, is Cassamarca Foundation Chair in Latin

Humanism at the University of Western Australia and a Foundation Chief
Investigator in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the
History of Emotions: Europe 1100–1800. She is the author of Loyola’s Bees:
Ideology and Industry in Jesuit Latin Didactic Poetry (2003) and Prescribing
Ovid: The Latin Works and Networks of the Enlightened Dr Heerkens (2013), as
well as of many chapters on neo-Latin poetry, the early modern Society of
Jesus, and history of psychiatry and emotions. Her current interests lie in the
Latin literature of the Suppression of the Society of Jesus.

l. b. t. houghton is Teaching Fellow in Classics at the University of

Reading, Teaching Fellow in Latin at University College London, and
Associate Lecturer in Greek and Latin at Birkbeck College, University of
London. He has edited three collections of essays: with Maria Wyke,
Perceptions of Horace (Cambridge, 2009); with Gesine Manuwald, Neo-
Latin Poetry in the British Isles (2012); and with Marco Sgarbi, Virgil and
Renaissance Culture (forthcoming). Other publications on neo-Latin litera-
ture include a chapter on Renaissance Latin love elegy in the recent
Cambridge Companion to Latin Love Elegy (2013), and several articles on
the reception of Virgil’s fourth Eclogue.

craig kallendorf is Professor of Classics and English at Texas A&M

University. He is the author or editor of twenty-one books, the most
recent of which is The Protean Virgil, Material Form and the Reception of
the Classics (2015), and 150 articles, book chapters, and reference book
entries, many in the area of Neo-Latin Studies. A recipient of major grants
from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Loeb Classical
Library Foundation, he gave the annual lecture for the Bibliographical
Society of America in 2015 and is immediate past president of the Inter-
national Association for Neo-Latin Studies.

sari kivistö, Ph.D., is Director of the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced

Studies, University of Helsinki. Her recent research publications include
xiv List of Contributors
The Vices of Learning: Morality and Knowledge at Early Modern Universities
(2014), Medical Analogy in Latin Satire (2009) and Kantian Anti-Theodicy:
Philosophical and Literary Varieties (with Sami Pihlström, forthcoming).

sarah knight is Professor of Renaissance Literature in the School of

English at the University of Leicester. She has translated and co-edited
Leon Battista Alberti’s Momus (2003) and the accounts of Elizabeth I’s
visits to Oxford for John Nichols’ The Progresses and Public Processions of
Queen Elizabeth I: A New Edition of the Early Modern Sources (2014), and is
currently editing and translating John Milton’s Prolusions and editing
Fulke Greville’s plays. With Stefan Tilg, she has co-edited The Oxford
Handbook of Neo-Latin (2015).

gesine manuwald is Professor of Latin at University College London.

Her research interests include Roman drama, Roman epic, Latin oratory
and neo-Latin literature. She has published a number of articles on neo-
Latin poetry and co-edited the volume Neo-Latin Poetry in the British
Isles (2012).

david marsh (Ph.D., Harvard, 1978), Professor of Italian at Rutgers, is

the author of The Quattrocento Dialogue (1980), Lucian and the Latins
(1998), Studies on Alberti and Petrarch (2012) and Exile in Italian Writers
(2013), as well as the translator of Alberti’s Dinner Pieces (1987), Vico’s New
Science (1999), Petrarch’s Invectives (2003), and Renaissance Fables (2004).

victoria moul is Senior Lecturer in Latin Language and Literature at

King’s College London. She has published widely on Latin poetry, on
classical reception in early modern English literature and on neo-Latin
literature. Significant publications include Jonson, Horace and the Classical
Tradition (Cambridge, 2010) and the Latin poems for the new edition of
George Herbert, Complete Poems (2015). She is working on a book on the
relationship between English and neo-Latin poetry in Britain in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

felix mundt is Assistant Professor of Latin at the Humboldt University

of Berlin. He has published a critical edition of Beatus Rhenanus’ Res
Germanicae (2008). Apart from his interest in all genres of neo-Latin
 List of Contributors xv
literature, his research focuses on ancient lyric and its reception, and on the
representation of city spaces in Greek and Latin texts of late antiquity.

marc van der poel is Professor of Latin at Radboud University,

Nijmegen. His area of expertise lies at the crossroads between Latin
philology and ancient rhetoric and its receptions. He is working on a
new edition of Rudolph Agricola’s De inventione dialectica, and is the
current editor of Rhetorica. A Journal of the History of Rhetoric.

joel c. relihan is Professor of Classics at Wheaton College in Massa-

chusetts, where he also serves as Research Compliance Officer. His current
projects are an annotated translation of ps.-Lucian, The Ass, and a large
literary study, Panopticon: A History of Menippean Satire.

keith sidwell is Professor Emeritus of Latin and Greek at University

College Cork and Adjunct Professor of Classics in the Department of
Classics and Religion, University of Calgary. His neo-Latin research inter-
ests are focused on Lucian’s reception in the Renaissance and Irish Latin
poetry. Recent books are The Tipperary Hero: Dermot O’Meara’s Ormonius
(1615) with David Edwards (2011) and Poema de Hibernia: A Jacobite Epic
on the Williamite Wars with Pádraig Lenihan (2017). He has also contrib-
uted to the Oxford Handbook of Neo-Latin.

stefan tilg is Professor of Latin at the University of Freiburg. Previously

he was the first director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Neo-Latin
Studies in Innsbruck. His main neo-Latin research interests are drama and
fiction. He is the co-editor (with Sarah Knight) of the Oxford Handbook of
Neo-Latin (2015).

terence tunberg earned his Ph.D. in Classical Philology with a

Medieval Studies component at the University of Toronto in 1986. He is
currently a professor of Classics at the University of Kentucky. He has
published many studies of neo-Latin prose style and eloquence, as well as
several articles devoted to the question of imitation in neo-Latin.

françoise waquet, director of research at the Centre national de la

recherche scientifique (Paris), works on learned culture (sixteenth to
xvi List of Contributors
twenty-first centuries). Her main publications are: Le Modèle français et
l’Italie savante. Conscience de soi et perception de l’autre dans la République
des Lettres, 1660–1750 (1989); La République des Lettres, with Hans Bots
(1997); Le latin ou l’empire d’un signe, XVIe–XXe siècle (1998); Parler comme
un livre. L’oralité et le savoir, XVIe–XXe siècles (2003); Les Enfants de Socrate.
Généalogie intellectuelle et transmission du savoir, XVIIe–XXIe siècles (2008);
Respublica academica. Rituels universitaires et genres du savoir, XVIIe–XXIe
siècles (2010) and L’Ordre matériel du savoir. Comment les savants travaillent,
XVIe–XXIe siècles (2015).
 List of Neo-Latin Authors and Dates

Authors are listed alphabetically under their vernacular names, except in

cases where they are most commonly referred to by their Latin names.
Alternative names are given in [square brackets]. Cross-references under
separate entries for alternative names are given only in cases where alterna-
tive names are significantly different.
de Acevedo, Pedro Pablo, sj (1522–73)
Addison, Joseph (1672–1719)
Agricola, Rudolph (1444–84)
Agrippa, Heinrich Cornelius [of Nettesheim] (1486–1535)
Alberti, Leon Battista (1404–72)
Alciato, Andrea (1492–1550)
Aldegati, Marcantonio [Marco Aldegati] (fl. 1480–90)
Aldrovandi, Ulysses (1522–1605)
Alegre, Francisco Xavier, sj (1729–98)
d’Alembert, Jean Le Rond (1717–83)
Ammonio, Andrea (c. 1478–1517)
Andreae, Johann Valentin [Johannes Valentinus Andreae] (1586–1654)
Andrelini, Publio Fausto (c. 1462–1518)
Angeriano, Girolamo [Hieronymus Angerinaus] (1470–1535)
Anisio, Giano [Giovanni Francesco Anisio, or Anicio] (1465–c. 1540)
Annius (Giovanni Nanni of Viterbo) (c. 1432–1502)
Aretinus, Leonardus – see Bruni
Ariosto, Ludovico (1474–1533)
Arsilli, Francesco (1479–1540)
Avancini, Niccolò, sj (1611–86)
Aventinus, Johannes [Johann Georg Turmair, or Thurmayr] (1477–1534)
Bacon, Francis (1561–1626)
Balde, Jacob (1604–68)
Bandello, Matteo (1485–1561)

xvii
xviii List of Neo-Latin Authors and Dates
Barberini, Maffeo [Pope Urban VIII, 1623–44] (1568–1644)
Barclay, John (1582–1621)
Barlaeus, Caspar (1584–1648)
von Barth, Caspar (1587–1658)
Bartholin, Thomas (1616–80)
Barzizza, Gasparino (1360–1431)
Basini, Basinio [of Parma] (1425–57)
Baudouin, François [Balduinus] (1520–73)
Bauhuis, Bernard (1575–1614)
Bebel, Heinrich (1472–1518)
Beckher, Daniel [the Elder] (1594–1655)
Bembo, Pietro [Bembus] (1470–1547)
Benci, Francesco, sj [Franciscus Bencius] (1542–94)
Benningh, Jan [or Johan] Bodecher [Benningius] (1606–42)
Bernegger, Matthias (1582–1640)
Bernoulli, Jacob (1655–1705)
Beroaldo, Filippo [the Elder] (1453–1505)
Betuleius, Sixtus [Sixt or Xystus Birck] (1501–54)
de Bèze, Théodore [Theodorus Beza] (1519–1605)
Bidermann, Jakob, sj (1577–1639)
Biondo, Flavio [of Forlì] (1392–1463)
Bisse, Thoas (1675–1731)
Bissel, Johannes, sj [Biseelius] (1601–82)
de Blarru, Pierre (1437–1510)
Boccaccio, Giovanni (1313–75)
Bodin, Jean (1530–96)
Boethius, Hector [Hector Boece, Boyce or Boise] (1465–1536)
Bona, Giovanni (1609–74)
Bonfini, Antonio (1434–1503)
Bordini, Giovanni Francesco (c. 1536–1609)
Bourbon, Nicolas (1503–1550)
Boyd, Mark Alexander [Marcus Alexander Bodius] (1562–1601)
Braccesi, Alessandro (1445–1503)
Bracciolini, Jacopo (1442–78)
Bracciolini, Poggio [Poggius Florentinus] (1380–1459)
Brandolini, Aurelio Lippo (c. 1454–97)
Brant, Sebastian (1457–1521)
Brecht, Lewin [Brechtus] ofm of Antwerp (c. 1502–c. 1560)
Bridges, John (1536–1618)
Brinsley, John (bap. 1566–c. 1624)
 List of Neo-Latin Authors and Dates xix
Bruni, Leonardo [Leonardus Aretinus] (1370–1444)
Bruno, Giordano [Filippo Bruno; Il Nolano] (1548–1600)
Buchanan, George (1506–82)
Budé, Guillaume [Guilielmus Budaeus] (1467–1540)
Bugnot, Gabriel (d. 1673)
Bultelius, Gislenus (1555–1611)
Burmeister, Johannes (1576–1638)
da Calepio, Ambrogio [Ambrosius Calepinus] (1453–1511)
Camden, William (1551–1623)
Campanella, Tommaso, op (1568–1639)
Campion, Thomas (1567–1620)
Canonieri, Pietro Andrea (d. 1639)
Cardano, Gerolamo [Hieronymus Cardanus] (1501–76)
Cardulo, Fulvio, sj (1526–91)
Carmeliano, Pietro [Petrus Carmelianus, Peter Carmelian] (c. 1451–1527)
Casaubon, Isaac (1559–1614)
Castellanus, Petrus (1582–1632)
da Castiglionchio, Lapo (c. 1316–81)
Castiglione, Baldassare (1478–1529)
Caussin, Nicolas, sj (1583–1651)
Celtis, Conrad (1459–1508)
Ceva, Tommaso, sj (1648–1737)
Chaloner, Thomas (1521–65)
Champion, François, sj (1666–1715)
Cheke, John (1514–57)
Chytraeus, David [Chyträus] (1530–1600)
Cnapius, Gregorius [Knapski], sj (c. 1564–1638)
Codro, Urceo [Antonius Codrus Urceus] (1446–1500)
Colonna, Francesco, op (1433/4–1527)
Colucci, Benedetto (c. 1438–c. 1506)
Conti, Antonio [Abbé Conti] (1677–1749)
Conversini, Giovanni (1343–1408)
Cornarius, Joannes [Janus Cornarius] (c. 1500–58)
Corréa, Tommaso (1536–95)
Correr, Gregorio (1409–64)
Cortesi, Paolo (1465–1510)
Corvinus, Laurentius (1465–1527)
Cowley, Abraham (1618–67)
Crashaw, Richard (1613–49)
Crespin, Jean (c. 1520–72)
xx List of Neo-Latin Authors and Dates
Crivelli, Lodrisio (c. 1412–65)
da Cruz, Luís, sj [Ludovicus Crucius] (1542–1604)
Cunaeus, Petrus [Peter van der Kun] (1586–1638)
Curillus, Marius – see Heerkens, Gerard
Curlo, Giacomo [Jacobus Curulus] (fl. 1423–67)
Dacier, Anne Le Fèvre [Madame Dacier] (1647–1720)
van Dale, Antony (1638–1708)
Dantyszek, Jan [Ioannes Dantiscus] (1485–1548)
Darcio, Giovanni [of Venosa] (1510–c. 1554)
Dati, Agostino (1420–78)
Dati, Carlo Roberto (1619–76)
Dati, Leonardo, op (1360–1425)
Decembrio, Angelo (1415–67)
Denisot, Nicolas (1515–59)
Diedo, Francesco (c. 1435–84)
Dornau, Caspar [Dornavius] (1577–1632)
van Dorp, Erasmus Maarten [Dorpius] (c. 1485–1525)
Dousa, Janus [Jan van der Does] (1545–1604)
Draxe, Thomas (d. 1618)
Drummond, William (1585–1649)
Drury, William, sj (1584–c. 1643)
Du Bellay, Jean (c. 1493–1560)
Du Bellay, Joachim (c. 1522–1560)
Dugonics, András (1740–1818)
Dupuy, Jacques [Monsieur de Saint Sauveur] (1591–1656)
Dupuy, Pierre [Puteanus, but not Erycius Puteanus] (1582–1651)
Emili, Paolo [Paolo Emilio; Paulus Aemilius Veronensis] (c. 1460–1529)
Erasmus, Desiderius (1466–1536)
Ertl, Anton Wilhelm (1654–c. 1715)
Estienne, Henri [Henricus Stephanus] (1470–1520)
Euler, Leonhard (1707–83)
Fabricius, Georg (1516–71)
Facio, Bartolomeo (c. 1400–57)
da Feltre, Vittorino (1378–1448)
Ferrarius, Johannes Baptista [Giovanni Battista Ferrari] (d. 1502)
Ficino, Marsilio (1433–99)
Filelfo, Francesco (1398–1481)
Filelfo, Gian Maria [Gian Mario, or Giovanni Mario Filelfo] (1426–80)
Filetico, Martino (1430–90)
Firmianus – see Lisieux
 List of Neo-Latin Authors and Dates xxi
Fisher, Payne [Fitzpayne Fisher; Paganus Piscator] (1616–93)
Flaminio, Marcantonio (1498–1550)
Florio, Francesco (1428–83/4)
Fracastoro, Girolamo (c. 1478–1553)
Franchini, Francesco [Franciscus Franchinus] (1500–59)
Fraunce, Abraham (c. 1558–1633)
des Freux, André, sj [Andreas Frusius] (c. 1510–56)
Frischlin, Nicodemus (1547–90)
dei Frulovisi, Titio Livio (fl. 1420–50)
Gager, William (1555–1622)
Galvani, Luigi (1737–98)
Garzoni, Giovanni (1419–1505)
Gastius, Johannes [Johann Gast] (1500–52)
Giannettasio, Niccolò Partenio, sj (1648–1715)
Giberti, Gian Matteo [Joannes Matthaeus Gibertus] (1495–1543)
Giovio, Paolo [Paulo Jovio; Paulus Jovius] (1483–1552)
Giraldi, Lilio Gregorio (1479–1552)
Gnaphaeus, Willem (1493–1568)
Gott, Samuel (1614–71)
de Granada, Luis, op [Louis of Granada] (1505–88)
Gray, Thomas (1716–71)
Gretser, Jakob, sj (1562–1625)
Grimald [or Grimoald], Nicholas (1519–62)
Gronovius, Johann Friedrich (1686–1762)
de Groot, Willem (1597–1662)
Grotius, Hugo [Hugo de Groot; Huig de Groot] (1583–1645)
Guarino, Battista Guarini (1374–1460)
Guglielmini, Bernardo [Guilielminus] (1693–1769)
Guyet, François (1575–1655)
Hall, Joseph (1574–1656)
Harris, Walter (1686–1761)
van Havre, Jan [Johannes Havraeus] (1551–1625)
Heerkens, Gerard Nicolaas [Marius Curillus] (1726–1801)
Heinsius, Daniel [Daniel Heins] (1580–1655)
Herbert, George (1593–1633)
Hessus, Helius Eobanus [Eoban Koch] (1488–1540)
Holberg, Ludvig (1684–1754)
de l’Hôpital, Michel [Michael Hospitalius] (c. 1504–73)
Hortensius, Lambertus (1500–74)
de Hossche, Sidron, sj [Sidronius Hosschius] (1596–1653)
xxii List of Neo-Latin Authors and Dates
Huet, Pierre-Daniel (1630–1721)
Hugo, Herman, sj (1588–1629)
Hume, David [of Godscroft] (1558–1629)
Hume, James (fl. 1639)
Hussovianus, Nicolaus [Mikołaj Hussowczyk; Mikalojus Husovianas;
Hussoviensis; Ussovius; Hussowski] (c. 1480–c. 1533)
von Hutten, Ulrich (1488–1523)
da Imola, Benvenuto – see Rambaldi, Benvenuto
Janicki, Klemens [Clemens Ianicius] (1516–43)
Johnson, Christopher [c. 1536–97]
Johnston, Arthur (1587–1641)
Kepler, Johannes (1571–1630)
Kerckmeister, Johannes (c. 1450–c. 1500)
Kinloch, David (1559–1617)
Koch, Eoban – see Hessus
van der Kun, Peter – see Cunaeus
Lanckvelt, Joris van Lanckvelt [Georg Macropedius] (1487–1558)
Landino, Cristoforo (1424–98)
Lando, Ortensio (1510–58)
Lazzarelli, Lodovico (1447–1500)
Le Febvre, François Antoine, sj [Lefebvre] (1678–1737)
Legrand, Antoine (1629–99)
Leland, John [Leyland] c. 1503–52)
Leo, Bernadino (fl. 1572–85)
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (1729–81)
Lilienthal, Michael (1686–1750)
Linnaeus, Carl (1707–78)
Lippi, Lorenzo (1606–65)
Lipsius, Justus (1547–1606)
de Lisieux, Zacharie [Zacharias Lexoviensis; Petrus Firmianus; Pierre
Firmain; Louis Fontaines; Ange Lambert] (1596–1661)
Lloyd, John (1558–1603)
Locher, Jakob [Philomusus] (1471–1528)
Lombard, Peter (c. 1555–1625)
Longolius, Christophorus [Christophe de Longueil] (1488–1522)
Loschi, Antonio (1368–1441)
Lotichius, Petrus – see Secundus, Petrus Lotichius
Lotz, Peter – see Secundus, Petrus Lotichius
Lovati, Antonio (1241–1309)
Lübben, Eilert [Eilhard Lubinus] (1565–1621)
 List of Neo-Latin Authors and Dates xxiii
Lynch, John [Gratianus Lucius] (c. 1599–c. 1677)
Macrin, Jean Salmon (1490–1557)
Macropedius, Georg – see Lanckvelt
Maffei, Giovanni Pietro [Petrus Maffeius] (1533–1603)
Magliabechi, Antonio (1633–1714)
Malvezzi, Paracleto Corneto [Fuscus Paracletus Cornetanus De Malvetiis]
(1408–87)
Mambrun, Pierre (1601–61)
Mancini, Domenico [Dominicus Mancinus] (b. before 1434– d. after
1494)
Manetti, Giannozzo (1396–1459)
Mantuan, Baptista Spagnuoli [Battista Mantovano; Mantuanus;
Johannes Baptista Spagnolo] (1448–1516)
Marchesi, Paolo (fl. c. 1460–70)
Marcilius, Theodorus [Théodore Marcile; Claudius Musambertius]
(1548–1617)
Marot, Clément (1496–1544)
Marrasio, Giovanni (1400/4–1452)
Marullo, Michele (1453–1500)
Masen, Jacob, sj [Masenius; Ioannes Semanus] (1606–81)
Massieu, Gulielmo (1665–1722)
Massimi, Pacifico [Pacifico Massimo; Pacifico d’Ascoli] (1410–1506)
May, Thomas (1594/5–1650)
Meder, Johann (fl. 1495)
Melanchthon, Philip (1497–1560)
Melenchino, Tommaso (fl. c. 1500)
Melville, Andrew (1545–1622)
Ménage, Gilles (1613–92)
Mencke, Johannes Burkhard (1674–1732)
Mercier, Nicolas [Nicolaus], sj (d. 1657)
Milton, John (1608–74)
Molza, Francesco Maria (1489–1544)
de Montaigne, Michel (1533–92)
de Montaigu, Claude Hervé, sj (1687–1762)
Montanus, Petrus (1467/8–1507)
Moor, Robert (1568–1640)
Morata, Olimpia Fulvia (1526–55)
More, Thomas (1478–1535)
Morhof, Daniel Georg (1539–1691)
Morisot, Claude Barthélemy (1592–1661)
xxiv List of Neo-Latin Authors and Dates
du Moulin, Peter (1601–84)
Mucanzio, Francesco (fl. 1573–90)
Muret, Marc-Antoine [Marcus Antonius Muretus] (1526–85)
Musambertius, Claudius – see Marcilius
Mussato, Albertino (1261–1329)
Nagonius, Johannes Michael [Giovanni Michele Nagonio] (c. 1450–c. 1510)
de’ Naldi, Naldo (c. 1432–1513)
Nanni, Giovanni – see Annius Giovanni Nanni (Annius) from Viterbo
(1432–1502)
Nannius, Petrus [Nannink or Nanninck] (1500–57)
Naogeorg, Thomas [Kirchmeyer] (1508–63)
de’ Nerli, Neri [sometimes given as Nero de’ Nerli] (1459–1524)
Nessel, Martin [Martinus Nesselius] (1607–73)
Nifo, Agostino (1473–1545)
Nizzolius, Marius (1498–1576)
Nobili, Roberto, sj (1577–1656)
Nolle, Heinrich (d. 1626)
Nomi, Federigo (1633–1705)
Ocland, Christopher (d. c. 1590)
Olivier, François [Franciscus Olivarius] (1497–1560)
O’Meara, Dermot [Dermod] (fl. c. 1614–42)
Opicius, Johannes (fl. 1492–3)
Opitz, Martin (1597–1639)
O’Sullivan-Beare, Philip (b. c. 1590– d. c. 1634)
Owen, John [Ioannes Owen, Joannes Audoenus] (1564–1622)
Paganutio, Marco Antonio (no known dates)
Palingenio, Marcello [Marcellus Palingenius Stellatus] (c. 1500–51)
Pandolfini, Francesco (1470–1520)
Pandoni, Gianantonio de Porcellio (c. 1409–c. 1485)
Pansa, Paolo [Paulus Pansa] (1485–1538)
Papeus, Petrus (fl. 1539)
da Parma, Basinio – see Basini, Basinio
de Peiresc, Nicolas–Claude Fabri [Peirescius] (1580–1637)
Petit Nicolas (c. 1497–1532)
Petrarca, Francesco [Petrarchus; Petrarch] (1304–74)
Philomusus – see Locher
Philp, James (1654/5–c. 1720)
Piccolomini, Enea Silvio Bartolomeo [Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini; Pope
Pius II (1458–64)] (1405–64)
Pirckheimer, Willibald (1470–1530)
 List of Neo-Latin Authors and Dates xxv
Pius, Ioannes Baptista (c. 1475–c. 1542)
Plante, Franciscus (1613–90)
Platina, Bartolemeo (1421–81)
Polenton, Sicco (1375–1447)
de Polignac, Melchior (1661–1742)
Poliziano, Angelo [Angelus Politianus; Politian] (1454–94)
Pontano, Giovanni Gioviano (1429–1503)
Pontanus, Jacobus, sj [Jakob Spanmüller] (1542–1626)
Prasch, Johann Ludwig [Johannis Ludovicus Praschius] (1637–90)
Prasch, Susanna (1661–after 1691)
Pusculo, Ubertino [Ubertino Pusculus] (c. 1431–88)
Puteanus, Erycius (1574–1646)
Puttenham, George (1529–90)
Quarles, Francis (1592–1644)
Quillet, Claude (1602–61)
Rambaldi, Benvenuto [Benvenuto da Imola; Benvenutus Imolensis;
Benvenutus de Rambaldis] (1330–88)
Rapin, René, sj (1621–87)
Rastic, Džono [Junije Restić; Junius Restius] (1755–1814)
Restić, Junije – see Rastic
Restius, Junius – see Rastic
Reuchlin, Johann (1455–1522)
Reusner, Nicolas (1545–1602)
Rhenanus, Beatus [Beatus Bild] (1485–1547)
Rigault, Nicolas [Rigaltius] (1577–1654)
Rococciolo, Francesco (c. 1460/70–1528)
Ronsard, Pierre (1524–85)
Rossi, Gian Vittorio [Giano Nicio Eritreo] (1577–1647)
de Roulers, Adriaen [Adrianus Roulerius] (d. 1597)
Royen, Adrianus van [Patricio Trante] (1704–79)
Roze, Jean, sj [Ioannes Roze] (1679–1719)
Ruggle, George (1575–1622)
Rutgersius, Jan (1589–1625)
Sabinus, Angelus [Angelo Sabino; Angelo Sani de Cure; Aulus Sabinus;
Angelus Gnaeus Quirinus Sabinus] (fl. c. 1460–80)
Sabinus, Georgius [Georg Schuler] (1508–60)
Salutati, Coluccio (1331–1406)
Sambucus, Johannes Pannonicus [János Zsámboky; János Sámboki]
(1531–84)
Sangenesius, Joannes [Jean de Saint–Geniès] (fl. 1654)
xxvi List of Neo-Latin Authors and Dates
Sannazaro, Iacopo (1458–1530)
Sapidus, Joannes [Ioannis Sapidi Selestadiensis; Eucharius Synesius;
Hans Witz] (1490–1561)
Sarbiewski, Maciej Kasimierz [Matthias Casimirus Sarbievius; Casimir
Sarbiewski] (1595–1640)
Sautel, Pierre–Juste (1613–62)
Scaliger, Joseph Justus (1540–1609)
Scaliger, Julius Caesar (1484–1558)
Schoen, Cornelius (Schoenaeus) (1541–1611)
Scholirius, Petrus (1583–1635)
Schöpper, Jacob [the Elder] (d. 1554)
Schotten, Hermann (c. 1503–46)
Sectanus, Quintus [Lodovico Sergardi] (1660–1726)
Secundus, Joannes [Ianus Secundus] (1511–36)
Secundus, Petrus Lotichius [Peter Lotz] (1528–60)
Semanus, Ioannes – see Masen
Sepulveda, Ioannes Ginesius [Ioannis Genesius Sepulveda] (1490–1573)
Seymour, Anne (1538–88)
Seymour, Jane (c. 1541–61)
Seymour, Margaret (b. 1540)
Siber, Adam (1516–84)
Siculus, Lucius Marineus [Luciu Marineu Sìculu] (1460–1533)
Sigea, Luisa [de Velasco] (1522–60)
Sigonio, Carlo [Carlo Sigone; Carolus Sigonius] (c. 1524–84)
Soter, Joannes (fl. 1518–43)
Souciet, Etienne Auguste, sj (1671–1744)
Spagnoli, Battista – see Mantuan
Spanmüller, Jacob – see Pontanus
Speroni, Sperone (1500–88)
Sperulo, Francesco (1463–1531)
Stanihurst, Richard (1547–1618)
Stay, Benedict (1714–1801)
Stefonio, Bernardino, sj (1560–1620)
Stella, Giulio Cesare (1564–1624)
Stephanus – see Estienne, Henri
Stiblinus, Caspar (1526–62)
Stockwood, John (d. 1610)
Strada, Famiano [Famianus], sj (1572–1649)
Stradling, John (1563–1637)
Strozzi, Tito Vespasiano (1424–1505)
Sturm, Jean (1507–89)
 List of Neo-Latin Authors and Dates xxvii
Sturmius, Ioannes (1507–89)
‘Johannes Surius’, sj (fl. 1617–21)
Tarillon, François, sj (1666–1735)
Tasso, Torquato (1544–95)
Tedaldi, Francesco (c. 1420–c. 1490)
de Teive, Diogo (c. 1514–after 1569)
Tesauro, Emanuele (1592–1675)
Trante, Patricio – see Royen, Adrianus van
Traversari, Ambrogio (1386–1439)
Tribraco, Gaspare (Tribrachus) (1439–c. 1493)
Trissino, Gian Giorgio (1478–1550)
Valla, Lorenzo [Laurentius Valla] (1407–57)
Vaughan, William (1577–1641)
Vegio, Maffeo (1407–58)
Velius, Caspar Ursinus (c. 1493–1539)
Venegas, Miguel, sj (1531–after 1589)
Verardus, Carolus [Carlo Verardi da Cesena] (fl. 1492)
Verardus, Marcellinus [Marcellino Verardi] (fl. 1493)
Vergerio, Pier [Pietro] Paolo [the Elder] (1370–1444)
Polydore Vergil (1470–1555)
Verino, Michele (1469–87)
Verino, Ugolino (1438–1516)
Vida, Marco Girolamo (c. 1485–1566)
Villedieu, Alexander of [Alexander Dolensis; Alexander der Villa Dei]
(c. 1175–c. 1240)
de Villerías y Roelas, José Antonio (1695–1728)
Viperano, Giovanni Antonio (1535–1610)
Vitalis, Janus [Giano Vitale] (c. 1485–1560)
Vives, Juan Luis (1493–1540)
Vossius, Gerardus Joannes (1577–1649)
Ware, James (1594–1666)
Watson, Thomas (1556–92)
Weston, Elizabeth Jane [Elisabetha Ioanna Westonia; Alžběta Johana
Vestonie) (1582–1612)
Willes, Richard (1546–c. 1579)
Wilson, Thomas (1524–81)
Wimpheling, Jakob (1450–1528)
Zanchi, Basilio (1501–58)
Zovitius, Jakob (b. 1512– d. after 1540)
Zuppardo, Matteo (c. 1400–57)
 Acknowledgements

This book has been long in the making and has incurred many debts. I am
grateful to all the contributors as well as to Michael Sharp at Cambridge
University Press for their collective patience and good humour over several
years and repeated interruptions of various kinds. Thanks are also due to
the anonymous readers for their comments. For assistance and advice at
various stages of the project, I would like to thank in particular Stefan Tilg,
Nigel Griffin, Gesine Manuwald, Fiachra Mac Góráin and Robert Cum-
mings (who, very sadly, died before the book appeared). Clare Parsons was
a friend beyond compare, especially through two long periods of serious
illness and seemingly endless hospital visits. Above all, I thank my hus-
band, David Todd, for his unstinting love and support, and for sharing all
my pride and pleasure in our little family.

xxviii
 Introduction
Victoria Moul

This is an exciting time for the study of neo-Latin literature, especially in

the Anglophone world, in which awareness of this immense, and
immensely varied, corpus of writing has been less well developed than
elsewhere in Europe. A series of new publications, of which this is just one,
promise to open up the field, broadening our awareness of the sheer
volume of literature produced in the period between c. 1400 and c. 1700,
and exploring a variety of critical and theoretical approaches. This is the
first reference work dedicated specifically to neo-Latin literary genres,
which builds on the sketches offered by IJsewijn and Sacré’s still indispens-
able outline.1 Specially commissioned essays from scholars around the
world combine a survey of a given genre with discussion of representative
examples, demonstrating in each case the difficulties and rewards of close
and careful reading of these texts as Latin, and intended to pique interest
and suggest avenues for interpretation and research. In combination with
the recently published Brill’s Encyclopaedia of the Neo-Latin World and the
Oxford Handbook to Neo-Latin, scholars and students venturing into this
most challenging, enticing and rewarding of literary landscapes will
find themselves better equipped to make sense of what they find than
ever before.2

1
The first section of the second volume of IJsewijn’s Companion to Neo-Latin Studies, prepared in
collaboration with Dirk Sacré, has brief discussions of a wide range of genres (IJsewijn and Sacré
1998: 1–376). This volume in no way claims or aims to displace that work, the enormous range and
concision of which remain indispensable. The scope of the Companions, however, meant that the
treatments of individual genres were of necessity brief, with little space for comment or analysis
beyond the telling example. Moreover, IJsewijn’s volumes assume a high level of Latinity –
quotations are not translated – and fifteen years of increasing scholarly activity in the field mean
that the extremely useful brief bibliographies attached to each section have become dated.
2
The shape of this volume, its focus on literary concerns and its arrangement by genre was chosen in
part in consultation with two friends and colleagues, Sarah Knight and Stefan Tilg (both themselves
contributors to this book), whose complementary and more general work, the Oxford Handbook of
Neo-Latin, was recently published by Oxford University Press (Knight and Tilg 2015). The
compendious Brill’s Encyclopaedia of the Neo-Latin World (Ford, Bloemendal and Fantazzi) was

1
2 victoria moul
Neo-Latin literature – that is, Latin writing in a broadly classical style
and in a range of both classical and post-classical forms and genres – was a
central part of the cultural landscape of Renaissance and early modern
Europe at least until 1700, and in many places well beyond that date:
Ludvig Holberg’s engaging, widely read and profoundly influential Latin
novel, Nicolai Klimii iter subterraneum (‘Niels Klim’s Underground
Travels’), for instance, was published only in 1741.3 Both the reading and
writing of Latin was an essential element of advanced education,4 and
literary writing in Latin was held in high regard not only across Europe but
also beyond its borders.5 Authors seeking an international reputation
naturally wrote in Latin – successful works published in the vernacular
were rapidly translated into Latin just as works today are translated into
English – and Latin publications linked literary cultures across Europe and
encouraged interaction between them.6 Moreover, a wide range of Latin
literary forms – from epigram to historiography – were crucial to the
establishment and maintenance of both formal and informal patronage
and favour, and were also a common medium for social, political and
religious comment.
Despite this, neo-Latin literature has remained neglected by scholarship,
and (with very rare exceptions such as Thomas More’s Utopia) unknown
to the general reader: there are still relatively few reliable texts and transla-
tions, even of key works, and where critical assessments have been made
the relevant scholarly literature is found in a very wide range of European
languages, and often only in hard-to-access monographs and periodicals.
As a result, any student or scholar who is not already both an expert
Latinist and an experienced reader of Renaissance vernacular literature in
the relevant region or regions may find the field bafflingly obscure.

published in 2014. Online resources have also transformed the field and continue to do so: see for
instance Sutton’s Philological Museum of neo-Latin texts and bibiliography (http://www.philological
.bham.ac.uk); Ramminger’s Neulateinische Wortliste (http://www.neulatein.de) and the Leuven Neo-
Latin Bibliography (http://mill.arts.kuleuven.be/sph/links.htm). Neo-Latin scholarship is also
appearing in online publications with increasing frequency: recent examples include Fredericksen
2014, Moul 2014 and Moul 2015a.
3
This novel is discussed by Stefan Tilg in Chapter 19. See also Jones 1980, Peters 1986, Galson 2013
and Skovgaard-Petersen 2013.
4
See Chapter 3 in this volume, by Sarah Knight.
5
See IJsewijn 1990: 284–328 on neo-Latin writings in America, Africa, Asia and Australia. More
recently, important publications include Laird 2006 and Haskell and Ruys 2010. Knight and Tilg
2015 includes chapters on Spanish America and Brazil, North America and Asia.
6
A series of telling statistics on the ongoing importance of Latin publications are gathered throughout
Waquet 2001, for instance 80–99 on Latin scholarship. On translations into Latin, see Grant 1954
and Burke 2007a. The international dimension of neo-Latin literature has been partly obscured by
the tendency of individual scholars and research projects to focus on a particular geographical area.
 Introduction 3
This is a great loss, and not only to literary scholars. Latin language
and literature was the single most significant constituent of secondary
education for all Renaissance and early modern writers and thinkers, from
Petrarca (Petrarch) and Shakespeare to Francis Bacon or Gottfried Leibniz,
and early modern science as much as literature is caught up imaginatively
with Latin literary texts.7 When Abraham Cowley set out, in 1660, a
proposal for a college of natural philosophy, dedicated to the study of
‘things as well as words’, the preliminary training that he imagines for the
boys in the attached school is still one founded in Latin literature, albeit
with an unusual focus upon those authors who treat ‘of some parts of
Nature’.8 As Keith Sidwell notes in the final chapter of this volume, Neo-
Latin Studies have in recent years seen an increased interest in writing in
forms and genres – such as technical or scientific material – beyond those
traditionally considered literary. Such material is beyond the scope of this
book; but the centrality of Latin literary texts to Renaissance and early
modern education, and the resulting pronounced literary qualities and
stylistic self-consciousness of all kinds of writing, means that some appre-
ciation of neo-Latin literary forms and expectations is of great value even
for those whose primary interest is in intellectual history or the develop-
ment of scientific writing.
The format of this volume is designed with such a wide range of
potential readers in mind, and all Latin – even individual words and
phrases – is translated throughout. Translation is easy to criticize, but hard
to do well: thoughtful translations, sensitive to style and tone, are perhaps
the single most effective tool available to us to disseminate neo-Latin
literary material. But translation alone is not enough: the generic expect-
ations and allusive associations created by, for instance, a sixteenth-century
university play, a seventeenth-century ode, or Renaissance historiography
in a Tacitean style are distinct from those of their vernacular equivalents,
even where a ‘vernacular equivalent’ might reasonably be supposed to exist,
and they are also different from the purely ‘classical’ tradition – often
excluding even late antique works – in which modern classicists have
usually been trained. A few English poets in the 1590s did, for instance,
write recognizably classical ‘love elegies’ in English, and those experiments

7
On the role of Latinity within Renaissance and early modern education see Baldwin 1944, Bushnell
1996, Ong 1959, Grendler 1989, Witt 2000, Black 2001, Mack 2014. As Hans Helander puts it, ‘Up
to the eighteenth century educated people learnt nearly everything they knew by means of literature
written in Latin’ (Helander 2004: 13).
8
Cowley 1661: 46. For further discussion see Chapter 11.
4 victoria moul
are fascinating and in several cases markedly successful.9 But to read such
work without any regard for the vast hinterland of neo-Latin love elegy is to
distort it almost beyond the boundaries of comprehensibility. The percep-
tion and comprehension of genre is a product of readers’ own experience
and expectation: many neo-Latin genres have almost disappeared from
readability as a result.
This poses a particular problem for classical reception studies, a now
fashionable and productive field. It is tempting for the well-trained classi-
cist to seize upon, for instance, Latin love elegies by Massimi, Landino,
Secundus or Campion in order to point out a host of parallels with the
erotic elegies of Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus and Ovid.10 The patterns of
modern undergraduate classical programmes – in which Catullus, Proper-
tius and Ovid in particular are prominent components – and the relative
paucity of classically informed criticism of such neo-Latin material by
scholars of vernacular literature make this procedure hard to resist.11 And
of course such a method is not without value: these poems are indebted to
Catullus and the Augustan poets. Thomas Campion’s first elegy, for
instance, piles up a series of allusions to Propertius 3.1 and 4.1 and Ovid,
Amores 2.1 and 3.1 – a pointed choice of passages all derived from the first
poems in their respective books.12 But if we read Campion’s poem without
any awareness of the neo-Latin genre of love elegy – a much larger and
more varied set of texts than the classical Latin genre – we risk missing
much of its force: Campion claims to be the first British bard to write love
elegy, in a statement that is indebted to multiple statements of Roman
poetic originality but which also engages directly with the wealth of neo-
Latin elegy already in existence by the 1590s by authors from Italy, France,
Germany and the Netherlands.
The same is very often true of vernacular poetry: it has often been
observed that the charming lyrics which appeared first in Act 3, scene 7 of

9
The best known examples are elegies by Ben Jonson and John Donne, and Christopher Marlowe’s
translations of Ovid’s first book of Amores. The link between British Latin and vernacular elegy in
this period is discussed in Moul 2013.
10
I have been guilty of this myself, although Moul 2013 makes an attempt to discuss British love elegies
in English and Latin alongside one another, and to suggest some links between neo-Latin texts.
I have tried to develop this approach in Moul 2015d.
11
There has however been a wealth of excellent recent work on neo-Latin love elegy. Pieper 2008,
focused on Landino’s Xenia but offering a superb overview of the genre as a whole, is particularly
sensible on the possibilities and limitations of applying scholarship on classical Latin love elegy to
the neo-Latin genre. See also Parker 2012, Braden 2010 and Houghton 2013 as well as Chapter 6 in
this volume.
12
Some of these correspondences, and Milton’s inheritance of them in his own Latin elegy, are
discussed briefly in Moul 2013: 310–12. For Campion’s Latin verse see Vivian 1909.
 Introduction 5
Ben Jonson’s Volpone (3.7.165–83 and 236–9) and were then revised and
reprinted as poems 5 and 6 in Jonson’s 1616 collection The Forest are artful
patchwork translations of Catullus 5 and 7.13 But they are much more
profoundly ‘Catullan’ in the neo-Latin sense: there are countless brief
Latin lyrics, from Pontano onwards, which number kisses or lament the
death of pert and eroticized birds.14 The theme is not in fact less but much
more hackneyed than it appears to the modern reader who earnestly notes
the parallel with Catullus. Volpone’s deployment of poetry in that scene is
far from sincere – in fact, when his attempt at literary seduction fails, he
attempts to rape Celia instead.15 The lyrics are meant to sound beautiful,
but also unoriginal almost to the point of pastiche.
An appreciation of vernacular and neo-Latin literary traditions in add-
ition to classical literature is equally important in the appreciation of early
modern prose, whether Latin or vernacular. The extract from Erasmus’
Laus Stultitiae (‘Praise of Folly’) discussed by Terence Tunberg in Chap-
ter 14, for instance, combines sayings from Erasmus’ own Adagia with an
extended paraphrase of Horace, Satires i.3: a typical blend of ancient and
more modern sources, and of prose and poetry.16 The work is addressed
to Thomas More, and like More’s own prose is marked by the liberal use
of oral features – fables, mottoes and sayings – as well as a combination of
scriptural and classical authorities. Early modern printing conventions,
such as the use of italics or marginal notes to mark quotation or para-
phrase, often contribute to the reader’s appreciation of a work’s constituent
elements. Neo-Latin prose, especially the great wealth of ‘occasional’
material – such as speeches, dedications and letters – has, however, suffered
even more seriously than poetry from scholarly neglect. For this reason this
book includes an essay on neo-Latin prose style (Chapter 14) in addition to
the chapters on fiction, satire, historiography, epistolary writing, oratory
and declamation, and dialogue.
The decision to arrange this book by genre, rather than any of the other
possible organizational schemes, each of which has its own advantages, was
a pragmatic one: early modern critics show a consistent interest in generic
distinctions and definitions, and readers who find themselves confronted
by a significant piece of neo-Latin writing for the first time will probably
be able to assign it at least provisionally to a generic category, but are still

13 14
Herford and Simpson 1925–52: xi: 37–8. See Gaisser 1993 and Chapter 7 in this volume.
15
The very explicit eroticism of many of the neo-Latin Catullan poems in this tradition (much more so
than Catullus himself ) probably helps to suggest the true terms of Volpone’s interest.
16
See Chapter 14, 239–41.
6 victoria moul
fairly likely to be faced with a text or author for whom little or no scholarly
commentary is available. Each chapter is intended to help such a reader
gain a sense of the critical questions and concerns most likely to be relevant
to their text.
Such an organization naturally has drawbacks as well as advantages:
there is only limited space for considerations of wider historical and
cultural practice, and many types of Latin writing (such as manuals of
literary style and technique, or scientific material) have been omitted.17
This arrangement also risks concealing the great generic diversity and
flexibility that a single Latin writing career might encompass.18 More
seriously, the generic categories developed to describe classical texts – and
often a rather narrow canonical definition even of those – are not always
accurate descriptors of what one actually finds in neo-Latin writings.
A good example is the distinction between epigram, elegy and lyric
poetry. In the discussion of classical Latin poetry, these forms are fairly
well demarcated: classicists will think of Martial for epigrams, Propertius,
Tibullus and Ovid for elegy (that is, largely though not exclusively
‘love elegy’) and Horace for lyric. A second thought produces some
complications: Catullus’ short poems overlap all of these boundaries;
and what about Statius’ Silvae or (for the truly broad-minded classicist)
the poetry of Prudentius?19 But when we turn to neo-Latin the divisions
are even harder to maintain: a large proportion of neo-Latin epigrams are
written in elegiac couplets, and one also often finds poems in lyric metres
or even longer hexameter pieces included in ‘epigram’ collections; elegiac
couplets are also used – for instance by Thomas Campion – for Latin
versions of English poems we would undoubtedly describe as ‘lyric’. The
term silva is frequently used as a title (and a formal category) for
miscellaneous collections, whether of prose or verse.20 Moveover, many
neo-Latin poets experimented with metrical mixing within individual
poems of a kind that is not found in any classical text: both Abraham

17
The Oxford Handbook of Neo-Latin (Knight and Tilg 2015) covers neo-Latin writing as a whole, with
less emphasis on specifically literary matters but including substantial sections on ‘Cultural
Contexts’ and ‘Countries and Regions’ as well as ‘Language and Genre’. The Brill Encyclopaedia
(Ford, Bloemendal and Fantazzi 2014) offers a host of entries on many of these extra-literary modes,
and is particularly strong in its survey of Latin intellectual culture as a whole.
18
To get a sense of this, readers may consult the index (with many neo-Latin authors cited in multiple
chapters).
19
These examples are not chosen at random. All three were particularly influential texts upon neo-
Latin poets and, in the case of Statius and Prudentius, to a much greater degree than is suggested by
their current relatively marginal status in classics curricula.
20
On Renaissance and early modern Silvae, see Galand and Laigneau-Fontaine 2013.
 Introduction 7
Cowley and Peter du Moulin, for instance, used a background ‘narrative’
metre to set off inset lyrics.21 As work develops, neo-Latin literary
criticism will, I hope, begin to develop categories and distinctions of its
own, among which serious thought about how neo-Latin verse collec-
tions typically work as collections (rather than individual poems) is a
particular desideratum.
The quantity of neo-Latin literary material is enormous, and yet its
acknowledged ‘canon’ of most significant authors (insofar as there is one
at all) remains strikingly small and uncertainly fixed, especially if we
range beyond Italian Latin verse written before 1550.22 Such uncertainty
is both a challenge and an opportunity: obscurity is less of an obstacle to
study when everything is relatively obscure. Contributors to this volume
were given no constraints on the authors and texts they wished to discuss
under their generic heading: as a result the range of citations is accord-
ingly broad and, I hope, suggestive for future work in a great variety
of directions.

Reading Neo-Latin Literature: Occasion and Intertext

Two characteristic features of neo-Latin literature present particular prob-
lems for its modern interpretation, literary appreciation and overall ‘read-
ability’: the typically close relationship to social and political occasions, and
the complex interconnections with both classical and contemporary litera-
ture, as well as the Christian tradition.
Modern readers tend to doubt the ‘literary’ credentials of prose or
poetry produced for a specific occasion – such as a wedding, coronation,
or school or university celebration – or as part of a particular social
relationship, such as a request for patronage. (Although certain occasions
or relationships, such as bereavement or courtship, are typically con-
sidered to be more ‘personal’ and therefore more amenable to ‘authentic’

21
Cowley 1668 (Books 3 and 4 of the Plantarum Libri Sex use elegiac couplets as the ‘narrative’ metre).
In Peter du Moulin’s Ecclesiae Gemitus, narrative hexameter verses describe the plight of the English
Church, personified as a nymph, whose own song is an inset lyric in Alcaic stanzas (Moulin 1649:
39–40). The work was published anonymously in 1649, though later post-Restoration editions of du
Moulin’s verse acknowledge his authorship.
22
Within that bracket, a kind of ‘canon’ emerges by comparing the choices made by successive editors
of verse anthologies and series of edited texts; for the great majority of prose genres and for most
later Latin verse we do not even have that starting point. It would be interesting however to compile
a list of the authors and works most often included in early modern anthologies and text collections,
such as the many Delitiae or François Oudin’s Didascalia (Oudin 1749), and Selecta poemata
Italorum (1684; second edition edited by Alexander Pope, 1740).
8 victoria moul
literary production.) This creates problems for the appreciation of neo-
Latin literature, a great deal of which is ‘occasional’ to a greater or lesser
extent: whether composed directly in response to or celebration of a
particular person or occasion (such as George Buchanan’s Epithalamium
on the marriage of Mary Queen of Scots to the French Dauphin), or less
straightforwardly public material which is nevertheless framed and pre-
sented in a highly formal and often political fashion – for instance by its
dedication to a patron or monarch.23 From a large collection of epigrams,
for instance, we might extract only one or two on the most apparently
‘sincere’ and heartfelt themes – such as the death of a child – for careful
appreciation. To become sensitive and effective readers of neo-Latin
literature, we need to be prepared to appreciate the artistic qualities
and pleasures of formal writing, especially the literature of public rela-
tionships, and of highly stylized genres and their variations; and in
addition, we should be aware that even writings of the most formal or
even official kind may demonstrate stylistic verve, metaphorical power
and emotive force.
George Herbert’s series of letters as University Orator on the rather
unpromising subject of the proposed draining of the fens offer an example
of a typically ‘occasional’ piece of formal neo-Latin prose. The third of
these four letters, addressed to Sir Robert Naunton, a former orator and at
this time the secretary of state, begins abruptly:
Quanta hilaritate aspicit Alma Mater filios suos iam emancipatos, conser
uantes sibi Illos Fontes, à quibus ipsi olim hauserunt? Quis enim sicca vbera
et mammas arentes tam nobilis parentis aequo animo ferre posset? neque
sanè dubitamus vlli, si prae defectu aquae, commeatûsque inopiâ, deserer
entur collegia, pulcherrimaéque Musarum domus tanquam viduae effoetae,
aut ligna exucca & marcida, alumnis suis orbarentur, quin communes
Reipublicae lachrymae alterum nobis Fluuium effunderent.24
With what joy does my Alma Mater [‘Nurturing Mother’] look upon her
sons, newly freed as they are, and preserving for their use those fountains
from which they themselves once drew water? For who could bear with
equanimity the dry breasts and parched teats of so noble a parent? Indeed
none of us have any doubt that if a shortage of water and a lack of supply
led to the colleges becoming abandoned, and those most beautiful dwellings
of the Muses become like exhausted widows, or, the timber withered and
rotten, like women deprived of their own nurslings then certainly the
combined tears of the Republic would pour forth a second river for us.

23
For a brief consideration of occasionality in Renaissance vernacular literature, see Moul 2010: 211–17.
24
Epistolae vi in Hutchinson 1941: 461–2, the third of four letters (iv–vii) on the same topic.
 Introduction 9
This extraordinary passage is intensely personified: the university is
described, conventionally enough, as Herbert’s alma mater (literally, a
‘nurturing mother’), but Herbert presses the implications of this metaphor
to remarkable lengths: the river Cam – whose flow is threatened by the
planned and now cancelled draining – becomes his mother’s breasts,
parched and dry of milk if the draining goes ahead; the college buildings
are the ‘dwellings of the Muses’, complete with the fountains of poetic
inspiration, but when Herbert imagines them desolate and abandoned he
compares them to viduae – that is, women who have lost their husbands.
These widows are effoetae, ‘exhausted’ or ‘depleted’ – though the literal
meaning is ‘exhausted by childbearing’ – and they are also described as
women deprived of their alumni, nurslings, foster-children or pupils. The
very timber of the buildings would be exucca, ‘withered’, or ‘parched’, a
word which metaphorically relates back to the ‘dry’ and ‘parched’ breasts
of the dried-up maternal river. In a single paragraph, Herbert and his
fellow scholars and students are implicitly compared to nursling infants,
foster-children and husbands; the University (and her river) their mother,
wife and Muse.25
Traces of these resonant metaphors are found in Herbert’s English
poems (the Church is described as a mother in two poems from The
Temple, ‘Lent’ and ‘The British Church’), but they are much more
marked features of his unjustly neglected Latin poetry. The insistent
imagery of flowing liquid – water, milk, blood and even ink – domin-
ates Herbert’s four collections of Latin verse, particularly the poems of
devotion (Passio Discerpta, ‘The Passion in Pieces’), poetic inspiration
(for instance the first and last poems of Musae Responsoriae, ‘The
Muses’ Response’) and the extraordinary collection composed in the
immediate aftermath of the death of his mother (Memoriae matris
sacrum, ‘A Sacred Gift in Memory of my Mother’).26 This formal
letter, composed and sent in an official capacity and rooted in a set
of essentially conventional tropes and associations, is nevertheless both
stylistically striking and emotionally powerful. Moreover, the
consistency of imagery between this official note and the whole corpus
of Herbert’s Latin verse demonstrates the literary significance of

25
The passage also suggests the personification of Jerusalem as a widowed and despised woman at
Lamentations 1.1.
26
See Drury and Moul 2015 for text, translation and brief commentary on Herbert’s complete
Latin verse.
10 victoria moul
Latinity: Herbert’s Latin works – speeches, lyrics, epigrams and thank-you
notes alike – share distinctive patterns of imagery and association that do
not appear in the English material. His Latin style and persona are distinct
from his literary character in English, and draw upon separate sources:
classical literature of course, but also continental Latinity.
Yasmin Haskell’s essay on neo-Latin literature and its classical ghosts
(Chapter 1) tackles the question of classical intertextuality, and Tom
Deneire, in Chapter 2, considers the complex relationship between neo-
Latin and vernacular writing. I would like to conclude this introduction
with a taste of how surprising, original and moving neo-Latin literature
can be, not only despite but even because of its close relationship with
classical texts.
Pontano’s first eclogue, like Herbert’s remarkable letter of thanks,
begins abruptly and unexpectedly:
macron
Et grauida es, Lepidina, et onus graue languida defers,
Obbam lactis et haec fumanti farta canistro;
Hac, agedum, uiridi paulum requiesce sub umbra,
Declinat sol dum rapidus desaeuit et aestus.
lepidina
En lactis tibi sinum atque haec simul oscula trado;
Vmbra mihi haec ueteres (memor es) iam suscitat ignes;
O coniunx mihi care Macron, redde altera, Macron.27
macron
You are heavy with child, Lepidina, and heavy too is the
burden you slowly bear,
A pail of milk and a richly scented basket packed with food;
Come now, rest for a while in the green shade,
Until the swift sun is lower in the sky and the heat less raging.
lepidina
Look, I’ll pass you a bowl of milk along with these kisses;
For this shade is reviving my old passions (do you remember?);
O Macron, my dear husband, kiss me in return, Macron.
Macron and Lepidina are newly married: this tender prologue recounts
their first encounter and courtship, and is itself a frame for a mythological

27
Text from Pontano 2011: ‘Lepidina’, lines 1–7.
 Introduction 11
epithalamium which forms the bulk of this very long poem of over eight
hundred hexameter lines.28 There is nothing like this in classical Latin
pastoral, or indeed in classical Latin poetry at all. Particularly moving is
the counterpoint between the surprising content (the married lovers, the
pregnant woman in such a prominent position in the poem, the sensuality
of the Latin) and the familiar components (Virgilian pastoral vocabulary
and allusion; the mythological wedding for which this opening is a frame,
as in Catullus 64).29
The dialogue between Macron and Lepidina sounds Virgilian, and
indeed it is littered with reminiscences of sensuous and evocative lines
from the Eclogues. The third line alone combines echoes of Eclogue 9.20
(viridi in umbra, ‘in a green shade’) and Ecl. 7.10 (requiesce sub umbra),
while the phrase rapidus aestus in line four reworks rapido aestu of Ecl.
1.10. The obbam lactis (‘pail of milk’) of line 2 and lactis . . . sinum of
line 5 are similar to the sinum lactis which Thyrsis offers Priapus in Ecl.
7.33. But the Virgilian force of this opening depends on divergences
from as well as similarities to the Eclogues. Memory, forgetfulness and
loss are widely recognized to be key themes of Virgilian pastoral: the
opening lines of Virgil’s collection juxtaposes Tityrus, at ease beneath
his tree, with Meliboeus, forced to leave his land. In the ninth poem,
Moeris (who has also been evicted from his property) encounters
Lycidas on the road, and they exchange half-remembered fragments of
song. The loss of Moeris’ land and livelihood is reflected in the loss of
song: nunc oblita mihi tot carmina (‘so many songs I have now forgot-
ten’, 9.53). Pontano’s poem responds to this aspect of the Eclogues and
reverses it: Macron and Lepidina remember the past (memor es, line 6) –
in this case their passionate courtship – and, in remembering, rekindle
it. The opening lines of the poem are themselves ‘remembered’ success-
fully at its end:
macron
Suauia sint quaecumque feres, Lepidina, memento.

28
The mythological wedding is of the river god Sibetius and the nymph Parthenope, who stands for
the city of Naples itself. The myth is further developed in the writings of Pontano’s friend and
follower, Sannazaro. William Camden’s De Connubio Tamae et Isis (‘On the Marriage of the
Thames and Isis’) offers a British parallel. For commentary on the poem, see Pontano 2011,
Fernández-Morera 1982: 21–3 and Casanova-Robin 2006.
29
Fernández-Morera describes the ‘tactile quality’ of Pontano’s verse and suggests that ‘his originality
as a poet, without precedent or following, resides in his pagan treatment of carnality in conjunction
with a “bourgeois” enjoyment of the little pleasures of family and quotidian life’ (Fernández-Morera
1982: 23).
12 victoria moul
lepidina
Quin etiam geminata illi simul oscula tradam.
macron
Sic dices: ‘Cape, nympha, bonum, qui me urit, amorem
Obbam lactis et haec fumanti farta canistro [. . .]’30
macron
Remember, Lepidina, that whatever you bring must be sweet.
lepidina
I’ll bring him a double offering of kisses.
macron
You’ll say: ‘Take, nymph, as a sign of the true love which burns me
A pail of milk and a richly scented basket packed with food.’
The effect is quite different from Virgil: whereas the Eclogues constantly
remind us of death, fragmentation and forgetting, Pontano’s poem
emphasizes the efficacy of memory to revive and revisit physical pas-
sion – a conventionally fleeting experience, here rendered surprisingly
durable.
The durability of physical passion is connected in Pontano to Lepidi-
na’s pregnancy. The wish and hope for offspring is a conventional feature
of epithalamia, and Macron and Lepidina, who are already married and
expecting a child, optimistically foreshadow that promise. Once again,
Pontano emphasizes this aspect of his poem by deploying Virgilian
material to quite different effect. The heavily pregnant Lepidina echoes
the goat in Eclogue 1 who has just now borne two kids in the thicket of
hazel (14–15). Although Meliboeus describes these kids as spem gregis (15),
the ‘hope of the herd’, he is forced to leave them behind to die, an
emblem of a lost future. Pontano’s poem ends with those same twin
goats, not abandoned but instead offered as marriage gifts and a final
blessing.31
Pontano’s depiction of the eroticism and lasting intimacy of marriage
and family life is markedly unclassical, but it is quite in accord with his
work more generally: his groundbreaking elegiac collection De Amore
Conjugali (‘On Married Love’) is equally original in its dedication of an
entire elegiac collection to his wife, and includes (in the latter part of

30
Lepidina, ‘Pompa Septima’, 108–11. 31
Lepidina, ‘Pompa Septima’, 117–20.
 Introduction 13
Book 2) his remarkable Naeniae, Latin lullabies for his first son, in which
the infant longs for the breast in vocabulary carried over from the literature
of eroticism.32 Although strikingly original as poetry, Pontano’s develop-
ment of this theme responded to a broader contemporary interest in
married life, the laus uxoris (‘praise of the wife’) theme reflected in a large
number of Italian works from the early fifteenth century onwards.33 In
other words, Pontano is not just using classical (and here particularly
Virgilian) diction to pursue an unclassical subject; he is also responding
to and building upon contemporary literature. That is not to downplay
Pontano’s influence upon later neo-Latin and vernacular poetry: the
sensuality and emotional sophistication of Pontano’s ‘family’ poetry lays
the literary foundations for works as diverse as George Herbert’s poetry of
longing for his mother after her death in Memoriae matris sacrum, Gio-
vanni Pascoli’s extraordinary ‘Thallusa’, and perhaps even T. S. Eliot’s ‘To
My Wife’. The belief that neo-Latin literature is austerely impersonal,
concerned only with public life and even then limited to the static recast-
ing of classical elements, remains oddly persistent, despite the wealth of
evidence to the contrary.34
In the opening lines of Pontano’s first eclogue, Lepidina is gravida:
burdened and weighed down, late in her pregnancy and heavy with her
child. The poem Lepidina is too, like most neo-Latin literature, heavy with
the weight of what it carries: in this case, echoes of Virgil (and, elsewhere,
Catullus) in particular. But as Pontano is so careful to demonstrate, the
classical legacy is both heavy and fruitful: this lovely and surprising poem is
both profoundly Virgilian and quite unlike anything Virgil wrote. If we are
deaf to the allusive texture of neo-Latin literature then we are barely
reading it at all; but if we are content simply to list parallels without
further thought, then we will be equally deaf to the beauty and originality
of that substantial proportion of European literature that was written
in Latin.

32
See also Chapter 6.
33
On stylized marriage speeches and the literature associated with them, see De Nichilo 1994.
34
In fact, in many instances the most personal material is found in Latin: this is true, for instance, of
Thomas More, as it is of George Herbert, John Milton and even Thomas Hobbes.
 chapter 1

Conjuring with the Classics

Neo-Latin Poets and Their Pagan Familiars
Yasmin Haskell

A seeming continuity, a comfortable sense of shared recognition of ‘our’

authors, can blindside even the most reconstructed modern classicist who
picks up an early modern Latin poem in the style of Virgil, Horace, Ovid
or Lucretius. I say Latin poem, because the effect is somehow felt less
keenly when the classical borrowings have been received and transformed
into original vernacular works of literature. So while Ovid is an ubiquitous
influence in Shakespeare we never really sense the ghost of Ovid haunting
Shakespeare as we do, say, the Latin poetry of fifteenth-century Greek
refugee in Italy, Michele Marullo (1453–1500), or eighteenth-century
Dutch physician and Latin poet, Gerard Nicolaas Heerkens (1726–1801),
who styled himself, from his teenage years, a reverse cultural exile in his
homeland of Groningen.1 There is a deceptively simple reason for this
premature familiarity, a familiarity that has induced in some critics almost
a nausea avant de lire. It underlies, I suspect, that perennial and peremp-
tory dismissal of neo-Latin literature of almost every period, by classical
and modern philologists alike, for its belatedness, its derivativeness, its
presumed lack of sincerity or emotion. As to the last, suffice it to recall Leo
Spitzer’s verdict in ‘The Problem of Renaissance Latin Poetry’ (1955):
We are able now to grasp the main problem which presented itself to neo
Latin poets in general: how to give the flavour of new personal emotion to
the traditional Latin vocabulary? It was one thing to attempt to write
philosophical treatises or letters in the style of Cicero, satires in that of
Martial, tragedies in that of Seneca, and even eclogues in Virgilian fashion; it
is another to find a Latin medium of expression for the unique, immediate,
personal emotions, especially the emotions of love, that most generic feeling
of mankind that, wrongly or rightly, is conceived by us as requiring the most
personal expressions. The words we normally use in our vernaculars in order
to render what has moved us deeply have grown with us during our lives and

1
See Haskell 2013.

17
18 yasmin haskell
have thus acquired close affinity to our feelings: we have been tender, we
have been sad; when this happens, something in us says the words ‘tender’
and ‘sad’ and with these words we become still tenderer or sadder.2
The alleged absence of ‘emotion’ in neo-Latin poetry is a remarkably
persistent red herring which demands careful filleting elsewhere.3 For
present purposes, the significance of Spitzer’s criticism lies in his assump-
tion that the ‘traditional Latin vocabulary’, that is, the ancient words
themselves, have become, with time, insipid, bloodless, and past resusci-
tation through a fresh infusion of ‘feeling’.
When Thomas Greene adumbrated his notion of Petrarchan ‘sub-
reading’ as an extension of the early Italian humanists’ preoccupation
with excavating the material remains of classical antiquity, identifying a
‘necromantic’ mode in both the writing and criticism of that period, he
touched indirectly on what will be the main theme of this chapter.4
In fact Greene did not make an essential distinction between Latin and
vernacular imitations of the Latin classics, whether in authorial strategy
or reception effects. But it is important to acknowledge the obvious:
that neo-Latin poets practised a version of the necromantic art that was
different in kind from that of their vernacular rivals (or, for that matter,
their vernacular other selves); an art that was radically combinatorial, one
of breaking, binding, and re-animating a pre-existing materia poetica.
Might the real ‘problem’ with neo-Latin poetry be, then, that the bones
of Roman poetry inhere in it lexically and prosodically, in an unmedi-
ated, precisely material, form?
In her recent edition and study of Marco Girolamo Vida’s (c. 1485–1566)
De arte poetica (‘On Poetic Art’), Agnieszka Paulina Lew quotes one telling
nineteenth-century assessment of that tour de force of Renaissance
imitation:
The great misfortune of Vida, and ours, when we read him, is that he
doesn’t think. There are only some semblances, shades, echoes of ideas,
which come to him from afar, as halftones, half erased, and which become
weaker as soon as he wants to give them a visible body, vainly trusting in the
power of his creative inspiration. He doesn’t possess the feeling of the artist,

2
Spitzer 1955: 137 (emphasis original).
3
Peter Burke has cautiously endorsed Spitzer’s view: ‘It has been plausibly argued that neo-Latin poets
faced a serious problem when it came to expressing and communicating emotions, because they were
writing in a language which for writer and reader alike was devoid of the associations of childhood’
(Burke 1991: 37), but perhaps underestimates the emotional power (and power games) of the early
modern classroom.
4
Greene 1982: 92–4.
 Neo-Latin Poets and Their Pagan Familiars 19
nor of the poet. He has possibly not invented a single image, a single
comparison. All he gives us of this sort are dry, colourless sketches of the
ancient figures.5
Le Fèvre-Deumier’s nostrils seem to detect and curl here at a whiff of death
in Vida’s poem. The modern Latin poet doesn’t have sufficient puff to
bring his ancient material to life, the ‘semblances, shadows, and echoes of
ideas that come from afar’. Vida himself is effectively a zombie: ‘he does not
think’. And the crimes that the French Romantic writer imputed to
one humanist Latin poet, C. S. Lewis attributed to the entire movement:
‘They succeeded in killing the medieval Latin: but not in keeping alive the
schoolroom severities of their restored Augustanism. Before they had ceased
talking of a rebirth it became evident that they had really built a tomb.’6
It is also C. S. Lewis, of course, who furnishes us with the metaphor of
our title: ‘The energy of neo-Latin poets was wasted on a copying of the
ancients so close as to approach forgery or conjuring. The results often
please, but only as a solved puzzle pleases: we admire the ingenuity with
which ancient parallels are found.’7 I adopt it in this chapter as a sort of
scrying device through which to review a sample of neo-Latin writers, from
the fifteenth through nineteenth centuries, in the light of the ‘problem’ of
imitation. This is not because other metaphors – e.g. of apian digestion
and transformation, pregnancy, piracy, culling flowers, or sporting con-
test – were not applied, or applied more regularly, by Renaissance poets
and literary theorists.8 Rather, the semantics of conjuring seem best to
accommodate a range of relationships, more or less conscious, more or less
risky, between neo-Latin poet and his or her classical sources, from
simulation, ventriloquism, and other forms of playful poetic prestige,
through to more spiritually and politically imperilling, almost shamanic,
practices. What follows is far from a complete typology of these relation-
ships, but I hope that it may go some way to proving reports of the death,
or stillbirth, of neo-Latin poetry exaggerated.
***
At the most basic level, literary conjuring is allusion for the sake of illusion.
This is presumably the sense intended by Lewis when he collocates
‘conjuring’ with ‘forgery’, condemning the neo-Latin poets’ sleight of hand

5
Le Fèvre-Deumier 1854: 296–7, quoted by Lew 2011: 57. Translation mine. Le Fèvre-Deumier also
criticizes Vida for not citing any modern poets.
6 7
Lewis 1991: 21. Ibid.
8
The locus classicus is Seneca’s Epistulae Morales 84. See also Pigman 1980.
20 yasmin haskell
rather than any serious attempt on their part to summon up spirits. The
conjuror-juggler enters into an implicit pact with her audience, which
expects and wants to be deceived. Paradoxically, the neo-Latin poet qua
magician must, at the same time, reveal her hand: ars est revelare artem . . .
but not too much. We think of the bees of Virgil’s Georgics hovering over
Vida’s bijou didactic poem on silkworms, Bombyces, or the epic drollery of
his Scacchia ludus (‘The Game of Chess’).9 Philip Hardie appreciates a
passage in the third book of the De arte poetica, where Vida demonstrates
the power of figurative language through the simile of a traveller who
admires, from a cliff top, the reflections of trees and meadows on the
surface of a body of water nearby. Hardie suggests that ‘the same and
different’, also sums up the imitative poetics of Vida; ‘the pleasure felt by
the traveller deceived by the images that appear just beneath the surface is
surely that experienced by Vida’s own reader on recognizing the reflections
of other texts beneath the surface of this poem’.10
It is worth taking a closer look at this passage, to try to grasp some of the
elusive classical intertexts reflected in its watery surface:
nam diversa simul datur e re cernere eadem
multarum simulacra animo subeuntia rerum.
ceu quum forte olim placidi liquidissima ponti
aequora vicina spectat de rupe viator,
tantum, illi subiecta oculis est mobilis unda:
ille tamen silvas, interque virentia prata
inspiciens miratur, aquae quae purior humor
cuncta refert, captosque eludit imagine visus.
non aliter vates nunc huc traducere mentes
nunc illuc, animisque legentum apponere gaudet
diversas rerum species, dum taedia vitat. (3. 58 72)
For it is possible to see, at the same time, in the same thing, the diverse likenesses
of many things as they enter the mind. As when sometimes a traveller views the
very fluid surface of a calm sea from a nearby cliff all that is presented to his eyes
is the mobile water, but he marvels as he observes woods and green fields in
between, all of which the clearer liquid of the water portrays, deceiving his
enchanted gaze with the image not otherwise does the poet lead our attention

9
Admittedly Vida, in the De arte poetica, does advocate poetic piracy in one notorious passage
(3.234–42), boldly displaying his Virgilian thefts for all the world to see. But this is surely exempli
gratia: a work constructed entirely along these lines would be pastiche or cento, and Vida’s preferred
practice is closer to that which he describes at 3.217–22, the artful disguise of borrowing. On this
passage see Pigman 1990: 207–8.
10
Hardie 1992: 48.
 Neo-Latin Poets and Their Pagan Familiars 21
now here now there, and enjoys serving up to the minds of his readers the
different appearances of things, as he avoids being tedious.
It would seem that the future bishop of Alba is invoking here a decidedly
non-Christian spirit, that of Lucretius, imbuing the scene with both
painterly and fleetingly philosophical colours.11 The imagery of perception
and deception, and the very word, simulacra, transports us to the fourth
book of De rerum natura. In the small detail of the ‘mobile’ water we sense
Lucretius’ explanation, in his second book, of the mobility of the atomic
world which lies beyond our powers of sight; he had adduced there the
examples of a flock of sheep on a hillside which, from a distance, appears as
a blurred white mass, and of warriors in the heat of noisy battle, who, from
the mountains, appear as a bright patch at rest on the plain (2.308–32).
As these reminiscences play at the edges of our awareness, are we not also
subliminally primed to construct Vida’s viator as the serene observer/
Epicurean philosopher who, at the beginning of Lucretius’ second book,
observes sailors struggling at sea from the safety of shore? Yet Vida’s
wayfarer/reader marvels (miratur) at appearances, a naïve response to
nature which Lucretius had systematically aimed to dismantle in his poem.
But perhaps we are being led astray, our ‘enchanted gaze deceived by the
image’? Are these tricks of the conjuror or merely tricks of the light? It is
clear, at least, that there is no definitive ‘solving of the puzzle’ in the
manner assumed by C. S. Lewis. For the moment, let us simply grant
that the sort of writing Vida is preaching and practising in this passage is
ludic, distracting, its express purpose to avoid being tedious.
Vida is not preaching pastiche, exactly, although some neo-Latin poetry
undoubtedly falls into that category. The Bodleian miscellany, ‘Pamphlets
of Modern Latin Verse’ no. 27, contains the Oxford prize poem for 1897,
Arnold Sandwith Ward’s Empedocles. The Balliol College alumnus imper-
sonates Empedocles in a 239-line poem which, notwithstanding its Latin
appearance, spoke to the Philhellenic fashion of the day.12 Ward reaches
back through Lucretius to call up the Greek spirit who, perhaps even more
than Epicurus, had haunted the De rerum natura. The Oxford poem takes
the form of a lecture, as it were straight from the philosopher’s mouth, and
as such it also recalls Ovid impersonating Pythagoras (in the voice of
Lucretius) in Metamorphoses 15. Ward clearly had fun imitating the

11
Not for the first time in this poem. Pigman convincingly finds evidence of Lucretian thefts even
where Vida is hymning Virgil (Pigman 1990: 205–6).
12
Ward 1897. See Stray 1998, chapter 1, especially 17–19; Turner 1989.
22 yasmin haskell
idiosyncrasies of Lucretius’ Latin and using him as a ‘medium’ through
which to give his newly fashionable, de facto Romantic, Greek philosopher
voice. But it is a voice, as it were, under a bell-jar, the Sheldonian theatre,
and one that impresses now as it will have then with its coloratura rather
than its power.
***
In the early modern period it could be far more dangerous to play with
pagan spirits. The metaphor of conjuring not only captures something of
the spiritual trepidation expressed by the earliest neo-Latin writers as they
summoned up the ghosts of an alien culture,13 but also of that precarious
balance of authorial control and self-surrender demanded in all non-
trivial acts of poetic theurgy. Lucretius held a lifelong and ultimately
fatal attraction for Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno (Il Nolano,
1548–1600), and appears almost to have possessed him in his 1591 Frankfurt
trilogy of Latin didactic poems, especially in the first and last of these, ‘On
the Triple Minimum and Measure’ (De triplici minimo et mensura), and
‘On the Immense and the Innumerable, or on the Universe and Worlds’
(De immenso et innumerabilibus, seu de universo et mundis) (hereafter De
minimo and De immenso). Here the modern philosopher-poet affects a
vatic spontaneity, a ‘certain inclination to incorrectness’,14 thumbing his
nose at linguistic and literary pedantry as much as he does at Catholic
Aristotelian physics.15 But if Bruno’s diction, orthography (use of archaic
genitives and infinitives) and metaphors (of light and dark, gigantomachy,
impossible monsters and phantoms of the Underworld) veritably flaunt
their Lucretian inheritance, an unrepressed scorn for his philosophical
opponents and an apparent indifference to the identity, progress,
let alone literary pleasure, of his reader, is, in fact, the very antithesis of
the genial coaching and cajolery of the De rerum natura. It is as if the body
of the neo-Latin text, if not the soul of the poet, is being fought over by
the demons of a cool-headed, didactic Lucretius and a hot-tempered,
visionary Empedocles.

13
The anxieties felt by some of the proto-/pre-humanists who attempted composition of classical-style
poetry (however much the ancient poets were deemed to be divinely inspired) are discussed by
Ronald Witt in the context of Albertino Mussato’s late-life religious crisis (Witt 2003: 159–61). For
similar concerns in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, see Nüssel 1999.
14
The phrase is Arturo Graf’s (Graf 1878: 114), cited in Mariani 1983: 323. See also Fiorentini’s
introduction to the philosophical poems (Bruno 1879–91, vol. i.i–iii: xxxix–xli). These volumes
may be downloaded from the Warburg Institute: http://warburg.sas.ac.uk/research/completed-
research-projects/giordano-bruno/download-page/.
15
See Barbèri-Squarotti 1960 and Haskell 1998b: 127–38.
 Neo-Latin Poets and Their Pagan Familiars 23
The opening of De immenso, which combines elements of the proems to
Lucretius’ first and third books, as well as Epicurus’ flight of the mind at 1.
72–9, is emblematic of the revelatory self-confidence with which Bruno
sets forth his own philosophy of nature:16
Est mens, quae vegeto inspiravit pectora sensu,
Quamque iuvit volucres humeris ingignere plumas,
Corque ad praescriptam celso rapere ordine metam:
Unde et Fortunam licet et contemnere mortem;
Arcanaeque patent portae, abruptaeque catenae,
Quas pauci excessere, quibus paucique soluti.
Secla, anni, menses, luces, numerosaque proles,
Temporis arma, quibus non durum est aes adamasque,
Immunes voluere suo nos esse furore.
Intrepidus spacium immensum sic findere pennis
Exorior, neque fama facit me impingere in orbes,
Quos falso statuit verus de principio error,
Ut sub conficto reprimamur carcere vere,
Tanquam adamanteis cludatur moenibu’ totum.
Nam mihi mens melior; nebulas quae dispulit illas,
Fusim, qui reliquos arctat, disjecit Olympum,
Quando adeo illius speciem vanescere fecit,
Undique qua facile occurrit penetrabilis aer.
Quapropter dum tutus iter sic carpo, beata
Conditione satis studio sublimis avito
Reddor Dux, Lex, Lux, Vates, Pater, Author, Iterque:
Adque alios mundo ex isto dum adsurgo nitentes,
Aethereum campumque ex omni parte pererro,
Attonitis mirum et distans post terga relinquo.
There is a mind, which has inspired our breast with lively perception, and which
delights to implant swift wings on our shoulders, transporting a lofty heart to its
predestined goal, whence it can scorn Fortune and Death. And the mystic doors
are opened and the chains broken, which few have escaped, from which few are
released. Centuries, years, months, days, and countless generations, the weapons
of time, to which steel and diamond are not hard, have wanted us to be free from
their folly. Thus, undaunted, I rise up to cleave vast space with my wings, nor
does rumour make me dash against those spheres which true error has built on
false premises, that we might in reality be restrained by a fabricated prison, as
though the universe were shut in by walls of adamant. For I have a better

16
Compare the opening chapter of De minimo, where Bruno began Ut mens (v. 1) and proceeded to a
hymn to Nature combining elements of Lucretius’ hymn to Venus with a mystic passion on the part
of the philosopher-poet, and incorporating, or even parodying, the conventions of Roman elegiac
and Petrarchan love poetry. (Bruno 1879–91: i.iii: 132–3, vv. 14–51.)
24 yasmin haskell

understanding which has dispelled those clouds; the permeable air which, pouring
out, shuts all others in, has torn down Olympus, since wherever it comes into
contact with it, easily, from every side, it makes it vanish. Therefore, while I safely
plot my course, on high, following my heart’s desire, happy enough in my lot,
I am returned as Leader, Law, Light, Father, Author, and Path: and as I rise up
from that world into other gleaming worlds, and wander the ethereal field in all
directions, I leave it far behind, a wonder to the wondering.17 (1 24)
Like Ward, Bruno regresses through the shade of Lucretius to recover a
haughty and hieratic Empedoclean persona – but philosophically, unlike
the Victorian Englishman, the Renaissance Italian is speaking for himself.
In this respect his poem differs, too, from so many later Lucretian didactic
poems, written by Catholic priests to celebrate modern scientific advances,
such as Benedict Stay’s (1714–1801) Newtonian Philosophiae recentioris libri
decem (Rome, 1755–92). Bruno is his own Epicurus, crashing through the
walls of the world, slaying the monsters of superstition like the Hercules/
Epicurus of Lucretius’ fifth book. He is also the rebellious giant, Encela-
dus, buried under Mt Etna (De immenso 4. 1), ecstatically liberated from
his imaginary burden as he understands that there is no difference between
sublunar and celestial matter.18 But if this scenario primarily evokes
Epicurus’ assault on the heavens in DRN 1, I suspect that Bruno’s Encela-
dus codes for Empedocles:
Anguipedum generose magis, furibunde, proterve,
Invictoque gigas vultu, sub pondere vasto
Trinacriae: audaci quondam ausus robore coelum
Scindere, nunc pressus resupino pectore ab altis
Collibus, hac triquetra tumulatus mole superbis;
Impie, nempe animi petulantis proemia iactans,
Talibus insultas superum imperterritus irae.
Most noble giant of the snake footed race, raving, violent, unbroken in appear
ance under the vast weight of Sicily: you who once dared, with bold force, to
cleave the heavens, now on your back, your chest pinned down by high moun
tains, interred under this three cornered bulk you are proud; impious, of course,
as you vaunt the exploits of your impudent spirit, unafraid you mock the anger of
the gods with these words.19 (1 7)

17
Bruno 1879–91: i.i: 201–2. In his prose commentary to this chapter Bruno cites ‘Hermes
Trismegistus’, who called man ‘a great wonder’ and capable of becoming a god (206).
18
‘I am part of the star and of the brilliant lamp which no Etna annihilates, since the earth is
discovered to be weightless throughout its limbs. And so, therefore, liberated and free and elated
I see none of them moving, the vain artifice of the circling heavens has receded’ (Bruno 1879–91: i.
ii: 2).
19
Bruno 1879–91: i.ii: 1.
 Neo-Latin Poets and Their Pagan Familiars 25
Enceladus seems to breathe with the same volcanic spirit as Empedocles in
Lucretius’ sublime description at DRN 1. 716–30, where the sacred man is
revered as a marvel, almost a force of nature. (Note the recurrence of the
adjective triquetra.) Bruno’s own soteriological pretensions crystallize in
the giant’s refrain: ‘Therefore let the burdens of Atlas surrender to ours’
(Ergo se nostro submittant pondera Athlantis), which has something of both
the pugilist’s challenge and of Christ’s ‘Come unto me, all ye that labour
and are heavy-laden . . .’ (Matthew 11: 28–30). Bruno identifies with the
geologically sublime once again in the first chapter of the sixth book, where
he describes a huge monolith rising out of the sea, firmly anchored to the
ocean bed, its ‘lofty peak surveying the watery main, standing with its solid
bulk against the insane waves, scorning them unafeared as they
threaten . . . the more the deep torments of the sea surge against it, and
the more violently the tide rushes in with its sudden force, so much the
more pitiably will they be dashed aside, broken by their own weight,
dispersed and dissipated’ (vv. 5–16).20 The awesome resistance of the rock
is compared to that of the true philosopher (sc. Bruno) whose opponents
will be swept away like a dust storm of atoms (vv. 22–4). The monstrosity
of Enceladus/Empedocles is appropriated by Bruno in the sphragis
(authorial signature) to this poem, where he assumes the persona of gauche
and hyper-sexed Corydon/Polyphemus, unconcerned with social or aes-
thetic protocols.21
Notwithstanding his imitation of Lucretius and of the Lucretian
Empedocles, however, Bruno never really sounds like anyone but himself.
Some of the stylistic features of his Latin verse, for example his penchant
for long periods and avalanches of asyndeton, are paralleled in his Italian
prose, notably in the misogynistic harangue in the preface to Sidney of the
De gl’eroici furori (‘On the Heroic Frenzies’).22 This is also the work in
which we find the most explicit extant statement of Bruno’s poetics. In the
first dialogue, Cicada scoffs at literary critics who deny the status of poet to
the greatest of the ancients (including Lucretius) for not measuring up to
Aristotelian standards, because ‘Homer was not, in his genre, dependent
on rules, but was the origin of rules that may be of use to those more
inclined to imitate than invent, and they were collected by someone who
was not a poet of any kind, but who knew how to collect rules of that one

20 21
Bruno 1879-91: i.ii: 167–8. The passage is discussed in Haskell 1998b: 134–6.
22
There is a Lucretian subtext to Bruno’s tirade against the unheroic Petrarchan lover who cultivates
his melancholy (Bruno 1865: 4–5). In the fifth dialogue of the first part, and the first of the second,
Bruno quotes directly in Latin from DRN 4 (127–8, 140).
26 yasmin haskell
kind, that is, of Homeric poetry, to serve whomsoever might wish to
become not another poet, but someone like Homer, not of his own Muse,
but the ape of somebody else’s.’23 But if Bruno makes love to his own
Muse (the expression is his), not Homer’s, how does he find what is
unmistakeably his own voice in neo-Latin poems so thoroughly infused
with Lucretius? I venture it is because – paradoxically for so independent a
thinker – Bruno submits to the spirit of Lucretius in his Latin poetry.
The Epicurean poet irrupts into the De immenso and minimo in many
more places than can be discussed here, but suffice it to say not always in
the predictable places, and never in the slavish manner prescribed by ‘certi
pedantacci de’ tempi nostri’ (‘certain rotten pedants of our time’) who
police the appropriate use of fables and metaphors, the manner of making
invocations, and criticize poets for not ‘having their beginnings of songs
and books in conformity with those of Homer and Virgil’.24 Bruno was
inspired first and foremost by Lucretius the freethinker, not the poet.
There are, moreover, strong affinities between the Epicurean cosmology
and the Nolan’s that can sufficiently account for his abiding, if not
escalating, engagement with the De rerum natura.25 A not insignificant
point of difference, however, is the fact that Bruno’s infinite and atomic
universe is animate.26 We may well wonder why Bruno never takes
Lucretius to task in the patronizing manner reserved for Aristotle and his
latter-day disciples, captured in the figure of the ‘wretched old man’
(miserande senex) apostrophized in De immenso 3. 2, ‘turning the pages of
your foggy volumes, stooped, bent-over, hunch-backed, crooked, gibbous,
like Atlas – as he is oppressed by the weight of the sky whose sight he
lacks – you go fishing with your net in the Stagirite stream for monsters,
for the figments of foolishness’ (vv. 6–10).27 As he finesses Lucretian
pessimism about the decline of the world for example, he does not take
the opportunity openly to sneer at or slyly to undermine his model as
would anti-Lucretian poets of his own day and after:

Ergo si quae sors destruat unum

E mundis, plureisve simul, vel si lubet omneis,

23 24
Bruno 1865: 29. Bruno 1865: 30.
25
See Monti 1994; cf. Salvatore 2003. Bruno came to identify personally and defiantly with the
maligned author of the De rerum natura as his own religio-political troubles intensified.
26
De minimo 3.3 (Bruno 1879–91: i.iii: 141). Cf. DRN 1. 483–502 (proving the solidity of atoms in spite
of appearances of fluidity).
27
Scrutaris nubes, nebulosa volumina vertens / Cernuus, incurvus, gibbosus, pandus, Athlantis / Instar, ut est coeli
suppressus pondere, cuius / Aspectu careat, Stagyreo e flumine monstra, / Phantasiae nassa, expiscaris
stultitiarum (Bruno 1879–91: i.i: 321).
 Neo-Latin Poets and Their Pagan Familiars 27
(Quod sane haud rerum patitur sine fine potestas,
Extensusque vigor, sors non eademque locorum,
Qui ad fatum innumeri nequeunt tractarier unum),
Vita recursabit, naturaque materiei,
Hoc ipso instaurata, suo dat cuncta recessu.
Sed non propterea rationis carpo elementa
Impia, Democriti adstipulatus sensibus, atqui haec
Mentem alta agnosco moderantem cuncta paternam.
Therefore if some misfortune should destroy one of the worlds, or several at once,
or if you like all which clearly would not be allowed by the infinite power of
things, and the extensive life force, and the same misfortune could not operate in
all places, and innumerable things cannot be dragged to the same fate life will
return, and the nature of matter, renewed by this very setback, will bring
everything back. But I do not on this account make use of the impious elements,
and assent to the opinions of Democritus, and I recognize a paternal mind
moderating all these things, at a deep level.28
Lucretius’ voice is amplified in the Frankfurt poems wherever his opinions
resonate with Bruno’s, and where they don’t, Bruno quietly turns the dial.
The effect is of the modern poet enhancing rather than overriding the
ancient, so that, with the benefit of the wisdom of the centuries, Bruno
becomes almost an avatar of Lucretius.29 Indeed, it would not have been
beyond the bounds of the Nolan’s own philosophy of Nature to have
imagined himself a literal reincarnation of his favourite Latin poet.30

***
But ‘conjuring with the classics’ could be a much more calculated activity:
the strategic mobilization by modern poets of ancient ones to do their
bidding in Latin verse. At the turn of the eighteenth century, Milanese
Jesuit mathematician and poet, Tommaso Ceva (1648–1737), conjured and
almost too successfully stopped up the spirit of Lucretius in the Latin
baroque bottle of his Philosophia novo-antiqua (‘New-Old Philosophy’) of
1704, an anti-Lucretian didactic poem on ancient and modern materialism.31

28
Bruno 1879–91: i.ii: 126. Cf. e.g. DRN 1.215–25.
29
In his Oratio valedictoria to the University of Wittenberg, Bruno traces the unfolding of the prisca
sapientia down to the Germans: it manifested first among the Egyptians and the Assyrians; then the
Persians; third, the Indian gymnosophists; fourth, the Thracians and Libyans; fifth, the Greeks
under Thales and the other sages, and ‘sixth among the Italians under Architas, Gorgias,
Archimedes, Empedocles, Lucretius’ (Bruno 1879–91: i.i: 16). The latest incarnation, if you like,
of this ancient wisdom, is the Lucretian poet, ‘Palingenius’, praised at Bruno 1879–91: i.i: 17).
30
See Mercati 1961: 98, for testimony by Bruno’s fellow prisoners to his belief in interplanetary
transmigration of souls and his personal recollection of past lives, including as a swan.
31
Ceva 1704.
28 yasmin haskell
The subtlety of the Jesuit author’s exploitation of the De rerum natura
has been generally underestimated.32 It is true that, on the surface, Ceva’s
poem feels far less Lucretian than the better-known Anti-Lucretius sive de
Deo et natura (‘Anti-Lucretius; or, on God and Nature’) of Cardinal
Melchior de Polignac (Paris, 1747). Unlike Ward, Ceva does not ventrilo-
quize, nor, like Bruno, does he allow himself to be ‘possessed’ by the spirit
of Lucretius. And while Ceva’s poem is in six books of hexameters, treats of
physics, cosmology, epistemology, and human rationality, Lucretius does
not seem to be its leading man. Each book is a ‘dissertatio’, almost a ‘sermo’,
and Ceva is a talking, walking poet, by turns preachy and arch.33 The
personality and preoccupations of the historical priest are palpable in his
self-disclosures (e.g. love of the peaceful life of mathematics (p. 83); bilious
outrage at those who seek, like Lucretius, to undermine religion (p. 44)) as
well as many references to contemporary cultural and intellectual life
(including the theatre, art, gardens and animal automata). At the same time,
though, we cannot miss the presence of Horace accompanying Ceva along
the middle path, both in the recurrent appeals to common sense and
knowing our limits, and in the very project of a poem that programmatically
purports to reconcile ancient and modern physics.34 So while Ceva’s poem,
like Bruno’s, is polemical, it pulses with a literary life of a quite different
kind – one born of the hybrid vigour of two judiciously crossed ancient
models.35
In his third book, Ceva resurrects Lucretius and Epicurus in the poetic
flesh, to debate them on hardly equal terms.36 Its proem, as I have argued
elsewhere, is an ingenious and by no means obvious revision of the proem to
Lucretius’s third. The reader has been prepared for the Roman poet’s return

32
Canziani 1996: 144. I am also guilty of having once dismissed the poem as un-Lucretian, but revised
my opinion in Haskell 2008.
33
Ceva enjoys the metatheatre of the didactic progress of his reader/pupil, inviting us to revive
ourselves with snuff or hot chocolate, and at the end of the fifth book, effectively to take a toilet
break, so that the poet can have our full attention in the sixth. While Lucretius periodically exhorts
Memmius to pay attention, Ceva’s manner is more down-to-earth and self-deprecating – he also
complains about his own flagging powers – and ultimately more Horatian.
34
On the motif of the middle path, see Haskell 2008: 499 and n. 7.
35
Thus the most outwardly ‘Lucretian’ book, the third, is also the most satirical, and the presence of
Horace is felt in a perfect storm of parody, fable, dialogue, sarcasm, low humour and invective.
Towards its close, Ceva apologizes for ‘leading his Muse, who set off along the shore on foot, across
the rocks, by such a long and unproductive path’ (Longo adeo ac sterili Musam deducere calle |
Egressam in littus cursu per saxa pedestri (Ceva 1704: 52, my emphasis), a reference to Horace Sat.
2.6.17.
36
The figure of Epicurus is also encountered in the third book, ‘Gemini’, of Palingenius’ Zodiacus
vitae. It is an intriguing possibility that Ceva may have been inspired by Palingenius’ semi-didactic,
semi-satirical, and wholly heretical poem to re-animate Epicurus at this point in his.
 Neo-Latin Poets and Their Pagan Familiars 29
from the grave in the closing verses of the second book, where Ceva warns of
the approach of night and of terrifying simulacra.37 In the finale of the third,
the Jesuit poet engages an obligingly voluble Epicurus, who is asked to
account, for starters, for the seemingly impossible growth of a citron on a
wild fig tree. Epicurus’ eagerness to explain away ‘marvels’ and his tenden-
tious reasoning are rendered delightfully ludicrous, but the rationale he
provides for the horticultural portent has a more sinister edge: ‘just as a bubo
comes up, with its black swelling, on those afflicted by plague, constituted
by I know not what hooked atoms, which lay hold of the souls and tear them
out of the ailing body, just so this citron clings as a swelling to the fig tree,
woven from those atoms which the citron cadavers have sent out from their
decaying bowels’ (Ceu tactis lue cùm bubo subnascitur atro / Tubere, nescio
queis atomis compostus aduncis, / Quae prensant animas, aegroque è corpora
vellunt; / Haud secus hoc cedrinum tuber ficulneae adhaesit, / Textum atomis,
quas illa cadavera citrina putri / Emisere alvo, p. 54). The imagery of death
and disease cannot fail to remind the reader of Lucretius of the diatribe of
Mors at the end of DRN 3 (and, naturally, of the plague at the end
of Book 6). Earlier in his third book, Ceva had compared the errors of
Lucretius to a swollen abscess in need of lancing (p. 44), and the Epicurean
had been charged with polluting Helicon with ‘foul poison, whence youth
drinks in the lethal poison everywhere’ (tetro veneno / unde bibit virus passim
exitiale iuventa, p. 45). Notwithstanding his quintessentially Lucretian
interrogation of Lucretius to deconstruct the very materiality of the
DRN – it must be constituted out of the poet’s own atoms of mind, boring
through readers’ eyes and into their brains – Ceva treats that poisonous text
with extreme caution. He may well have believed in the literal psychic
contagiousness of ideas,38 and certainly in the seductive power of literature
to corrupt the young, the half-learned, and women. The manuscript circu-
lation of Alessandro Marchetti’s vernacular translation of Lucretius was
causing the Catholic Church concern, and Ceva did not want it to fall into
the wrong hands.39 But his open assault on the personified Epicurus and
Lucretius is, probably, a warning shot for the benefit of Latinate readers
susceptible to the DRN’s modern, ‘poetic’ spin-offs, the cosmologies of
Descartes and Gassendi, which are represented in the Philosophia novo-
antiqua as flights of fancy, artworks, the risible impostures of the charlatan

37 38
Haskell 2008: 503–4. See my Introduction to Haskell 2012: 1–18.
39
Although not placed on the Index of Prohibited Books until 1718, the DRN was not printed in Italy
between 1515 and 1647. See Beretta 2008: 181. For its reception by the Jesuits, see Paladini 2011:
177–90.
30 yasmin haskell
from ‘some foreign country’ who ‘tries to put it over the mob that stones
thrown into the air there sometimes change direction, often stop in the
middle of their course, and not uncommonly rise up spontaneously from
the ground’ (Circitor, ignotae regionis mira recensens, / Imponat vulgo, saxa
illic iacta per auras / Interdum obliquare vias, consistere saepe / In medio cursu,
non rarò assurgere in altum / Sponte ab humo, p. 6). The virtual juggling tricks
of this philosophical conjuror are met with laughter, we are told, but they
exemplify what Ceva fears most about Lucretius’ poem, that it is a vector for
just such presumptuous ‘creative’ thinking in the reader. It is precisely
because he has tasted the sweetness of De rerum natura that the Jesuit takes
such care to wipe the honey from the cup, teasing and resisting the spirit of
Lucretius not just through the device of prosopopoeia but also at a more
pervasive stylistic level.
***
In the introduction to his Harvard ‘I Tatti’ edition of Vida’s Latin epic on
the life of Christ, James Gardner writes that: ‘Vida, like most neo-Latin
poets, and despite his flawless channelling of the spirit of Vergil in his
hexameter verse, does not attain to the highest ranks of poetry. Why this
[sc. not attaining to the highest ranks of poetry] should be true of neo-
Latin poetry in general is, perhaps, something of a mystery.’40 C. S. Lewis
might have objected that Vida is inferior precisely because of the attempted
channelling, but it is in any case far from ‘flawless’, as Gardner himself
makes clear in his discussion of some of Vida’s curious similes. We could
never suspect even a reincarnated Virgil of writing the Christiad. But what
might it really mean for a Christian neo-Latin poet such as Vida to
‘channel’ the spirit of Virgil?
Vida’s Christiad exemplifies his own injunction and caveat in the De
arte poetica to steal and transplant textual cuttings from the ancient
plant – always bearing in mind that the most useful grafts will be those
that have ‘forgotten their former flavours’ (sucos oblita priores).41 Notwith-
standing its choice Virgilian diction, epic similes and speeches, Vida’s
Christiad is no Aeneid by scriptural numbers. One might go so far as to
say that Vida attempts to forget in the Christiad the gentile poet he had
openly revered in the De arte poetica.42 But how is it possible for a neo-

40
Vida 2009: xxi (italics mine).
41
Hardie notes Vida’s witty grafting in this passage (3.231–4) of Georgics 2.59 and 81–2, combining
contradictory injunctions about literary grafting/ degeneration of self-seeded stock (Hardie
1992: 49).
42
This poem is also discussed, from a different angle, in Chapter 11 on didactic poetry.
 Neo-Latin Poets and Their Pagan Familiars 31
Latin writer to forget the sources he has drained from youth – and, for
that matter, via exactly the sort of rigorous poetic apprenticeship envis-
aged for him in Vida’s didactic poem? Philip Hardie observes that ‘the
internalization of models [sc. Virgil] to the point of total fluency of recall
and recombination is at least a precondition for what Vida understands
by inspiration’.43 But it is a passage towards the end of Vida’s De arte
poetica, well dubbed ‘surprising’ by Hardie, that best reveals the peculiar
potential of neo-Latin verse to surprise its own composers – not always in
a good way.
In advising the neo-Latin poet to review his draft after setting it aside for
a long period, Vida describes a situation all too familiar to writers of
doctoral dissertations, let alone verse!
Tum demum redit, et post longa oblivia per se
incipit hic illic veterem explorare laborem.
ecce autem ante oculos nova se fert undique imago,
longe alia heu facies rerum mutataque ab illis
carmina, quae tantum ante recens confecta placebant.
miratur tacitus, nec se cognoscit in illis
immemor, atque operum piget, ac sese increpat ultro.
Then at last he returns, and after long neglect he begins here and there to review
the ancient labour in its essence. But lo, a new image meets his eyes from every
quarter, and the appearance of things is so greatly changed, and his verses so
different from those which, so long ago, pleased when they were freshly com
posed! He marvels in silence and does not recognize himself in them, forgetful,
and he is disgusted by his work, and freely chides himself. (3. 473 9)

As Hardie observes, ‘the reader’s recognition of novelty, otherness, and

change is here examined in the special case of the identity of reader and
author’, and the passage nicely illustrates its own lesson by referencing
Aeneas’ vision of the dead Hector in 2.270–6 (quantus mutatus ab illo):
‘and how changed are the Virgilian phrases in their new context!’44 But
for all Vida’s skilful modulation from georgic to epic mode and the
unexpectedness and aptness of the allusion identified here, we must not
lose sight of the fact that the poet is lamenting a loss of self, especially in
that poignantly ambiguous phrase: ‘and he does not recognize himself in
them, forgetful, and he is disgusted by his work’. On the surface, Vida is
making the rather trite point that the neo-Latin poet (like any other
writer) reviews his work and finds it/himself lacking. He thought it/he

43 44
Hardie 1992: 48. Hardie 1992: 50–1.
32 yasmin haskell
was good, but now, on closer inspection, he notices a false quantity, a
jarring phrase, an inept simile. In the lines that follow, the poet predict-
ably recommends careful revision. But immemor, and in this position, is
freighted with other meanings – Orpheus’ forgetfulness of Eurydice the
most obvious, with its pre-history in Catullus 64 – and the phrase
increpat ultro points us back to at least two passages in the Aeneid.45
On a second reading, then, the object of the poet’s ‘forgetfulness’ is the
extent of his debts to his ancient model, some of which appear, in
retrospect, to be crass thefts, perhaps even to go against the grain of
the poem he is attempting to polish. G. W. Pigman III has mooted ‘that
a large proportion of the repetitions [in neo-Latin verse] is due to
coincidence and unconscious reminiscence – large enough, in any event,
to raise doubts about “imitations” and “borrowings”’, adding that
‘unconscious reminiscence may well pose the greatest obstacle to the
student of neo-Latin imitation; it could also worry the poet’. He reminds
us of Petrarca’s (Petrarch’s) ‘principle of not repeating the words of his
predecessors without explicitly citing them or making some significant
change [and] is troubled by his unintentional failures to avoid the
footsteps of his predecessors’.46 Vida’s neo-Latin poet ‘does not recognize
himself’ because now he sees his model all too clearly. Or perhaps what
he sees is a sort of Frankenpoem, cobbled together from the disiecta
membra of dead poets?
To give the neo-Latin poem life, Vida enjoins trimming of excess foliage,
atoning for sins, healing lame verses, eradicating pests, a restless, obsessive,
labour of agricultural and medical attention to our languishing text: ‘it is not
enough to deal with it once but the whole work should be rolled out every
year, three or four times, and the words eternally renewed with changed
colours’ (nec semel attrectare satis: verum omne quotannis / terque quaterque
opus evolvendum, verbaque versis / aeternum immutanda coloribus, 3. 494–7).
The process would seem to be interminable, although our preceptor does
concede that there must eventually be an end of it, since life is short. At some
ever-receding point, which he declines to fix, Vida can exhort us, with no
little georgic irony, to ‘stop delaying!’ (rumpe moras), to launch our work and
reap our praise.47 But is this ‘that praise colder than December, that I have

45
Geo. 4.491, cf. Cat. 64.58, 123, 135, 248; Aen. 10.278 (Turnus rousing his men), 830 (Aeneas chides
the Etruscans for not attending to the corpse of the slain Lausus).
46
Pigman 1990: 200. He cites the famous letter to Boccaccio (Familiares 22.2) in which Petrarch frets
about not recognizing, sometimes, that phrases he has assimilated from the ancient authors are not
original to him.
47
Like many neo-Latin poets Vida revised his own work even after it had gone to print.
 Neo-Latin Poets and Their Pagan Familiars 33
spoken purely and clearly’ – as Tommaso Ceva would put it, in a dialogic
epistle addressed to fellow Jesuit Latin poet, Niccolò Partenio Giannettasio
(1648–1715), on ‘the Latin language and imitation of the ancients’ – a praise
that comes from ‘me artfully shuffling various tiles around so that the joins
don’t show and they deceive the eye’ (laus illa decembri / Frigidior, quod sim
pure nitideque locutus. / hoc est tessellas varias sic arte locarim, / ut commissurae
lateant, & lumina fallant)?48 In the opening lines of that poem Ceva seems to
give frank voice to Vida’s repressed anxiety, confessing that, whenever he is
carried away by the poetic oestrus, his mind brimming with ideas, he feels
weighed down and shackled by the obligation to subject his verses to
the ‘sacred but hoary laws’ (sancta, sed hispida iura) of the ‘Senators
who preside over Latium’, viz. the ancient poets (Patres Conscripti / qui
Latio praesunt).49
Ceva offers no definitive resolution here of the ‘problem’ of neo-Latin
imitation of the Roman poets, whose laws ‘take away as much from the
genius and youth of Latin songs as they add to it of age and majesty’
(quantum addunt senii maiestatisque latinis / carminibus, tantundem adi-
munt genii atque iuventae).50 I hope to have shown in this chapter,
however, that some neo-Latin poems, including Ceva’s own Philosophia
novo-antiqua, can and do live. But their life exists somewhere between
the neo-Latin poet’s remembering and forgetting his/her ancient sources,
and their vigour may well be inversely proportional to his or her con-
scious attempts to channel a single classical author’s voice. The analogy of
the mosaic floor was used again by Ceva in the Philosophia novo-antiqua,
when he sarcastically inquired into the geometrical components of Lucre-
tius’ poem and mind,51 but, of course, neo-Latin poets did create, and
create meaning, by rearranging pieces of old poems. Sometimes they will
have been surprised and delighted by the new pictures and ideas that
emerged from this almost cleromantic art. But we must concede, in
conclusion, that the metaphor of ‘conjuring’ raises a spectre for literary
critics, of those uncompelled forces or phantoms that are almost always
found at play in even the most trivial neo-Latin verse. The pagan spirits
that linger in the shadows of neo-Latin poetry were not only capable of
possessing or deluding their original necromancers but persist today as a
residue of intertextual energy that can dazzle and confound modern
interpreters.

48
‘De lingua latina, & de veterum imitatione. Niccolo Iannettasio e Soc. Iesu. Epistola’, Ceva
1704: 160.
49 50 51
Ceva 1704: 155. Ceva 1704: 157. Ceva 1704: 46.
34 yasmin haskell

F U R T H E R RE A D IN G
This chapter has concentrated on Italian poets. On Ceva see also Leone 2006 and
Colombo 2010. Ford 2013 explores the symbiosis between Latin and French
poetry in Renaissance France and its relationship to classical models. Several
recent studies, following Revard 1997 and Hale 1997, have usefully highlighted
the neo Latin dimension to John Milton’s classicizing poetry: Haan 2012a and
2012b, Kilgour 2012. For a contemporary of Ward’s who also imitated Lucretius
see Haskell 2009, showing how modern historical forces bubble under and distort
the apparently marmoreal surface of neo Latin verse.
 chapter 2

Neo-Latin Literature and the Vernacular

Tom Deneire

Neo-Latin and Vernacular Cultures

What exactly is the field of Neo-Latin Studies? It is a question that has
been asked with growing self-critical and methodological awareness since
the year 2000 and especially since Van Hal’s 2007 examen de conscience.1
Accordingly the 2009 conference of the International Association for Neo-
Latin Studies (IANLS) featured a panel devoted to the aims and methods
of Neo-Latin Studies, and the definition and demarcation of neo-Latin
language and literature.2 During the discussion following this panel, John
Considine asked a stimulating question regarding the very nature of neo-
Latin culture.3 Is it not the case, he wondered, that neo-Latin culture is
intrinsically ambiguous, in the sense that it can only really exist in relation
to vernacular culture?
Indeed, it appears that the very existence of neo-Latin culture as the
renowned via media between ancient and modern civilization is not
an independent cultural phenomenon, but one linked to a vernacular
backdrop that must condition the way this neo-Latin culture could be
construed by its practitioners as a second identity.4 This explains why in
Neo-Latin Studies in particular and in early modern history in general the

This chapter was written in the context of the NWO [Netherlands Organisation for Scientific
Research] project Dynamics of Neo-Latin and the Vernacular. The Role of Self-Representation, Self-
Presentation and Imaging in the Field of Cultural Transmission, Exemplified by the German Reception
of Dutch Poets in a ‘Bilingual’ Context (2009–13). For more information see http://dynamics.huygens
.knaw.nl/
1
Cf. Van Hal 2007: 349–52 for the background to the discussion.
2
Fourteenth International Congress of the International Association for Neo-Latin Studies (Uppsala,
2–8 August 2009): plenary panel discussion ‘Neo-Latin: Aims and Methods. Heinz Hofmann, Bo
Lindberg, Toon van Hal’.
3
John Considine MA, D.Phil. Oxon, Associate Professor at the University of Alberta, Faculty of Arts,
Department of English and Film Studies.
4
Cf. Burke 1991 (esp. 37–8).

35
36 tom deneire
relationship between neo-Latin and vernacular language and literature has
always been a key question.5
In the past, this relationship was often interpreted in a rigidly binary
scheme. In this view vernacular literature was meant for and produced by
the common people, while neo-Latin literature was an elitist, and often
male, cultural practice, performed and received by intellectuals and
society’s beau monde. Today, this view has been rejected by all but the
most stereotypical characterizations of early modern culture, and rightly so.
Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch, 1304–74) for instance, who is often seen as
the father of the Renaissance and the humanist recuperation of the classics,
already produced highbrow literature in both Latin and Italian. Conversely,
even great Ciceronians such as Carlo Sigonio (c. 1524–84) or Pietro Bembo
(1470–1547) apparently had difficulty expressing themselves orally in
Latin.6
By contrast, modern research has shown that all periods and segments of
early modern culture had to continuously redefine their position within
the cultural matrix of neo-Latin and vernacularity. Moreover, one needs to
stress the complexity and singularity of the different historical, geograph-
ical, social, practical, religious, philosophical, linguistic, literary or other
factors that influenced the way in which the dynamic between Latin and
the vernacular played out in specific cases. For instance, while Dante
produced, with his Divina Commedia, a learned religious epic in the
vernacular in early fourteenth-century Italy, it took until 1662 for the
Amsterdam playwright Joost van den Vondel to publish the first biblical
epic in Dutch, his Joannes de boetgezant on the life of John the Baptist.7
Whereas Italy had combined classical and vernacular traditions since the
dawn of humanism,8 it would take regions like the Low Countries or
England until the middle of the sixteenth century to develop a similar
culture of Latin-and-vernacular.9 As a result, whereas in Italy the vernacu-
lar can be said to achieve at least a theoretical parity with the classical
languages in the fourteenth and fifteenth century, the rest of Europe would
have to wait at least another century to witness a similar evolution.
Another well-known case in point is the notion that the vernacular was
generally more appreciated in Reformed circles with, for instance, Luther’s
Bible translation and the Anglican King James Bible, while the Roman

5
For more information, see Deneire 2014a and Deneire 2014e: 1–17 and 302–14.
6
Burke 1991: 40 on Sigonio; Erasmus 1906–58: Ep. 2594 on Bembo.
7
Porteman and Smits-Veldt 2009: 646.
8
For a good general characterization, see McLaughlin 1996.
9
Boutcher 1996: 191 and Carroll 1996: 246.
 Neo-Latin Literature and the Vernacular 37
Catholic curia for the most part preferred Latin. Upon studying actual
cases, however, one notices the dangers of overgeneralization.10 Luther’s
attitude to the vernacular was ambiguous.11 He might have given a ‘decisive
incentive to the development and use of the vernacular’, but he still ‘wrote
either in Latin or German . . . according to the readers he had in mind’.12
Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536), on the other hand, undoubtedly one of
humanism’s champions of Latinity, made great efforts to restore the Greek
text of the New Testament accompanied with his own Latin translation,
but was nevertheless aware of the benefits of a vernacular Bible.13 Similar
objections can be made to the supposed predominance of Latin in the
academic sphere: indeed as early as 1501 a German humanist appears to
have lectured on Juvenal in the vernacular.14
In this way, it appears that rather than interpreting the question of neo-
Latin and vernacular literature within a strict cultural dichotomy with
predetermined historical, social, religious, aesthetical or other values for
Latin or vernacular literature, the matter is a highly complex exercise of
cultural poetics, to use Stephen Greenblatt’s terminology, which needs to
be examined carefully almost on a case-by-case basis.15 The reader of neo-
Latin literature not only needs to be aware of the ubiquitous presence of
vernacular culture when dealing with neo-Latin texts, but also requires a
suitable framework in which to consider the full complexity of the inter-
action. To accommodate this need, this chapter will set out a general
methodology for the interpretation of neo-Latin literature vis-à-vis the
vernacular.

Neo-Latin and Vernacular Systems

The methodology adopted in this chapter is the so-called ‘systemic’
interpretation of literature or ‘systems theory’, mainly represented in
critical theory by the polysystem (or PS) theory of Itamar Even-Zohar,16
the radical constructivism model of Siegfried Schmidt17 and the social

10
Cf. Burke 1991: 27: ‘the difference between the Protestant and Catholic positions has been summed
up as “an evolution in opposite directions”, as the reformers came to see the problems in
abandoning Latin, and the Catholics those entailed by retaining it’ (referring to Schmidt
1950: 170).
11 12 13 14
See Stolt 1973. IJsewijn 1990: 190. See François 2008. Burke 1991: 31–3.
15
On Greenblatt’s notion of cultural poetics, see Greenblatt 1980: 1–9.
16
On PS theory, see Even-Zohar 1990, 2010; Toury 1995; Tötösy de Zepetnek and Sywenky 1997; Van
Gorp et al. 1997.
17
See Schmidt 1988 and 1992.
38 tom deneire
systems theory of Niklas Luhmann.18 For our purposes, however, we will
mainly employ Even-Zohar’s PS theory.
Polysystem theory proposes a so-called ‘dynamic functionalism’, which
combines structuralist and formalist ideas of literature as a semiotic
system.19 In this view, literature is a system of signs rather than a con-
glomerate of disparate elements, and as with any semiotic phenomenon
(language, culture, society), it is the functional relations between different
signs that produce meaning in the literary system.20 In this way, PS theory
defines literature as ‘(t)he network of relations that is hypothesized to
obtain between a number of activities called “literary,” and consequently
these activities themselves observed via that network’, keeping in mind that
‘there is no a priori set of “observables” that necessarily “is” part of this
“system”.’21 In this way, Even-Zohar suggests a systemic structure for
literature as a cultural practice, based on Jakobson’s well-known scheme
of communication, which he reformulates with the notions institution,
repertoire, producer, consumer, market and product.22 In short, this means
that in the case of Erasmus’ Laus Stultitiae (‘Praise of Folly’), for instance, it
is not the text itself which produces literary meaning according to PS
theory, but the functional relations between the text (product) and its
author (producer), readership (consumer), printer (market), its style and
models (repertoire), the canon of satirical literature (repertoire and insti-
tution), its critics (institution and consumer), etc.
More important for our purposes, however, is Even-Zohar’s reflection
on the systemicity of literature, i.e. the systemic qualities of the network of
relations we observe within the literary system.23 First, PS theory begins
from the observation that the literary system is dynamic and heteroge-
neous. Hence one should consider it not only in principle, but also in
time, and remain aware that the literary system is always a polysystem, ‘a
system of various systems which intersect with each other and partly
overlap, using concurrently different options, yet functioning as one

18
See Luhmann 1995.
19
Structuralist elements are indebted to De Saussure and Jakobson, and formalist ideas to Tynianov
(for Even-Zohar ‘the true father of the systemic approach’, Even-Zohar 1990: 29), Eichenbaum and
Shklovsky. Even-Zohar has also called attention to the overlap between his theory and Yuri
Lotman’s work (Even-Zohar 1990: 2) and the interesting ties with the work by Bourdieu (Even-
Zohar 1990: 30–1, cp. De Geest 1996: 33–4).
20 21
Even-Zohar 1990: 9. Even-Zohar 1990: 28.
22
The main difference here between Even-Zohar and Jakobson is that Even-Zohar views these notions
very broadly so that, for instance, producer covers not only authors, but also literary critics,
publishers, agents, etc. For more information, see Even-Zohar 1990: 27–44.
23
This section follows the outline of Even-Zohar 1990: 9–26. Cf. Even-Zohar 1990: 85–94 and 2010:
40–50.
 Neo-Latin Literature and the Vernacular 39
structured whole, whose members are interdependent’.24 Such a view is
particularly useful when considering a bipartite literary situation such as
that of neo-Latin and vernacular literature. In Even-Zohar’s words:
The acuteness of heterogeneity in culture is perhaps most “palpable,” as it
were, in such cases as when a certain society is bi or multilingual (a state
that used to be common in most European communities up to recent
times). Within the realm of literature, for instance, this is manifested in a
situation where a community possesses two (or more) literary systems, two
“literatures,” as it were. For students of literature, to overcome such cases by
confining themselves to only one of these, ignoring the other, is naturally
more “convenient” than dealing with them both. Actually, this is a
common practice in literary studies; how inadequate the results are cannot
be overstated.25
In this way, PS theory is well designed for the interpretation of cases like
the coexistence of neo-Latin and vernacular literature. While the appear-
ance of alternative literatures in different languages might seem ambiguous
and confusing to modern readers, the PS hypothesis demonstrates that
such a situation is simply a manifestation of a general and therefore
‘normal’ property of literature, namely its innate heterogeneity. This
already hints at a different perspective on the relationship between neo-
Latin and the vernacular than the aforementioned cultural dichotomy: one
in which bilingual writers like Dante, Jean Du Bellay (c. 1493–1560) or
Martin Opitz (1597–1639) might be the rule rather than the exception. In
this way, we come to view the different neo-Latin and vernacular particu-
lates of the literary system as single pieces that form one coherent cultural
puzzle through their interrelations. Moreover, this also leads to the more
general understanding that all literary products of a system, whether by
bilingual producers or not, need to be considered vis-à-vis parallel or
adjacent systems. For example, the vogue for epyllia in England in the
1590s has traditionally been treated as an English literary phenomenon
because of the archetypical examples from Shakespeare (Venus and Adonis
and The Rape of Lucrece). However, in light of PS theory, we now
appreciate how much our understanding of this subgenre is impaired if
we disregard the host of neo-Latin epyllia which established many of the
conventions of the genre.26

24 25
Even-Zohar 1990: 11. Even-Zohar 1990: 12–13.
26
I thank Victoria Moul for suggesting this point to me. See also Moul 2015a (online) and (discussing
only John Clapham’s Narcissus and Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis) Martindale and Burrow 1992.
40 tom deneire
Secondly, PS theory stresses that in light of the functional relations
between the individual items of the literary system such heterogeneity
must result in a situation of continuous competition, which Even-Zohar
calls dynamic stratification. Indeed, the polysystem usually contains
non-reconcilable items, so that any given system consists of a matrix of
rival options. To put matters concretely: when the Dutch scientist
Simon Stevin tried to replace the canonical Greek or Latin terminology
in the sixteenth-century Dutch vernacular system by coining vernacular
neologisms, the same basic systemic process (i.e. dynamic stratification)
was at work as when Lorenzo Valla (1407–57) tried to classicize the
contemporary Latin lexis and style of the Cinquecento Italian neo-Latin
system with his Elegantiae latinae linguae (‘Elegances of the Latin
Language’, 1444). Moreover, when viewed in the context of the larger
polysystem that harbours both neo-Latin and vernacular systems, we
observe throughout the history of neo-Latin literature a constant
struggle for domination between Latin and vernacular strata in the
literary polysystem. This theory of dynamic stratification, Even-Zohar
points out, not only allows one fully to acknowledge the tensions
between strata within systems, but also accounts for the processes of
change and the results of that change.
Thirdly, PS theory draws attention to the fact that such dynamic
stratification entails the socioculturally motivated formation of a canon:
‘by “canonized” one means those literary norms and works (i.e., both
models and texts) which are accepted as legitimate by the dominant circles
within a culture and whose conspicuous products are preserved by the
community to become part of its historical heritage’.27 Moreover canon-
icity is manifested not so much in individual texts, but most concretely in
the system’s repertoire, i.e. ‘the aggregate of laws and elements (either
single, bound, or total models) that govern the production of texts’.28 This
is also applicable to the neo-Latin and vernacular strata. In this way, we can
follow the results of dynamic stratification not only in well-known cases
such as the gradual canonization of the vernacular Bible after centuries of
reading Hebrew, Greek and mainly Latin Bibles, but also in more ‘mar-
ginal’ cases such as the neo-Latin novel. Indeed, although in the European
literary tradition the modern novel more or less started out in the vernacu-
lar, the seventeenth-century neo-Latin novels like John Barclay’s
(1582–1621) Argenis (1621) attempted to compete with the vernacular pro-
duction for a place in the canon of the literary system. Of course, their
27 28
Even-Zohar 1990: 15. Even-Zohar 1990: 17.
 Neo-Latin Literature and the Vernacular 41
struggle for literary supremacy would eventually prove fruitless, but the
Argenis did nevertheless succeed in influencing the further development of
the vernacular novel, as did classical Greek and Latin works such as
Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe or Petronius’ Satyricon, which had been
invested with renewed cultural authority through the general humanist
rehabilitation of classical literature.29
The above example demonstrates a fourth point of PS theory, namely
that these systemic principles and properties hold true both for the intra-
relations and for the inter-relations of the polysystem, since all semiotic
systems are ‘isomorphic’, in Even-Zohar’s terms. This means that the same
relations are observable both within certain literary systems and between
different literary systems. This offers us a similar approach to interpret, for
instance, the relations between neo-Latin and German seventeenth-
century Baroque literature (intra-systemic), or those between Dutch neo-
Latin lyric poetry and the German vernacular system (inter-systemic). The
result is, however, not only of methodological importance, it also serves as
a firm reminder of the extent to which European literary actors – espe-
cially, though not only in Latin – were in conversation with each other
right across the continent.
In short, PS theory helps the reader of neo-Latin literature in three ways.
First, it aids our understanding of neo-Latin literature per se, i.e. the
situation within the neo-Latin system in principle and in time. Secondly,
it connects the neo-Latin repertoire, products, market and other systemic
elements with contemporary and rival vernacular ones. And thirdly, it
relates these literary polysystems to other cultural systems, such as the
social system, which necessitates that ‘its hierarchies can only be conceived
of as intersecting with those of the latter’, therefore explaining ‘the hom-
ologous relations between literature and society’.30
Having analyzed these four major elements of PS theory, we are now
ready to consider Even-Zohar’s characterization of the history of neo-Latin
and vernacular literature:
Clearly, throughout the Middle Ages, Central and Western Europe consti
tuted one polysystem, where the centre was controlled by literature written
in Latin, while texts in the vernaculars (either written or spoken) were
produced concurrently as part of peripheral activities. Following a long
process of gradual decrease, this system, with its perpetuated canonized
repertoire, finally collapsed in about the middle of the eighteenth century,
to be replaced by a series of more or less independent uni lingual (poly)

29 30
IJsewijn and Sacré 1998: 255. Even-Zohar 1990: 23.
42 tom deneire
systems, whose interdependencies with the other (poly)systems became
more and more negligible, at least from the point of view of both consumers
and the dominating ideologies. However, it is apparent that in order to be
able not only to describe the general principles of interference, but also to
explain their nature and causes with certain exactitude, a stratification
hypothesis must be posited. For when the various European nations grad
ually emerged and created their own cultures most explicitly vehicled by
their new literatures, languages, and official histories certain center and
periphery relations were unavoidably present in the process from the very
start. Cultures that developed earlier, and which belonged to nations which
influenced, by prestige or direct domination, other nations, were taken as
sources for more recent cultures (including more recently reconstructed
ones). As a result, there inevitably emerged a discrepancy between the
models transferred . . . and the original ones, as the latter most likely might
have been pushed by that time from the center of their own system to the
periphery.31
In this way, the polysystem hypothesis is a useful hermeneutical tool for
the interpretation of the two key characteristics of neo-Latin and vernacu-
lar literature: their coexistence and complex interference (i.e. the relation-
ship between literatures, whereby a certain literature may become a source
of direct or indirect loans for another literature).32

Neo-Latin and Vernacular Normativity

This application of PS theory to neo-Latin and vernacular literary systems
demonstrates that the notion of dynamic functionalism is not an empty
one. Indeed, the systemic relations are best described in dynamic terms of
stratification, canonization, interference, etc. Underlying this dynamism of
any sociocultural system is a general notion of ‘normativity’, which has
been identified as a regulatory principle of the behavior observed in
systems by scholars like Hermans or De Geest.33 They have conceptualized
this notion using Greimas’ semiotic square to describe the constitutive
normativity that determines much of the internal structure and dynamics
of the system:34

31
Even-Zohar 1990: 24.
32
Even-Zohar 1990: 53. For more information on interference, see Even-Zohar 1990: 53–72 and 79–83;
2010: 53–69.
33
De Geest 1996; De Geest 2003; Hermans 1996 and 1999.
34
For Greimas’ own formulation, see Greimas and Rastier 1968.
 Neo-Latin Literature and the Vernacular 43

This scheme represents prescribed as opposed to forbidden literary

elements, with the added implication of elements that are not forbidden
(that is, tolerated) and not prescribed (that is, permitted).35 Such a sche-
matic representation helps to conceptualize the boundaries and the ever-
occurring changes in those boundaries of a system’s norms. In other words,
it allows us both to define the system’s constraints and its capacity for
constant diachronic evolution.
Let us take as an example the case of sixteenth-century neo-Latin
correspondence from the Northern Netherlands and consider the practice
of literary quotation. When reading this literature as a system in which the
repertoire includes quotation as a poetic option, we observe the following
‘rules’ for that practice. First, the author is obliged to frame the quotations
in a supporting main text, otherwise they do not constitute ‘quotations’.
This main text must be written in Latin, otherwise the whole literary
product cannot be considered part of the neo-Latin system. Furthermore
there is a clear prohibition: the quotes cannot be in the Dutch vernacu-
lar.36 Apparently, the Dutch language is not a part of the repertoire of the
neo-Latin literary system, which is clearly dominant over the vernacular
system in this case. Therefore, it is not permitted for a neo-Latin author to

35
The diagram is reproduced from Hermans 1996. Greimas distinguishes three relations in the
scheme: the horizontal lines represent the notion ‘contrary’, the diagonal lines ‘contradiction’ and
the vertical lines ‘implication’.
36
With the exception of technical terms, which first of all are not really literary quotations, and
secondly will almost always be accompanied by an apologetic comment from the writer for using the
‘vulgar’ tongue.
44 tom deneire
insert a quote from, for instance, a Dutch poem into his letter – although
that is not to say that to do so is strictly ‘impossible’. Should it have
happened (although I am personally unaware of an example), it would
certainly have incurred the disapproval of the contemporary literary insti-
tution and been rejected as an impermissible literary utterance. The
quotations that can be used, then, fall into two categories. First, those
that are permitted (but not obligatory), which generally means quotations
in ancient Greek. Indeed, the use of quotations from ancient authors like
Homer, Hesiod or Sophocles in this particular literary system is a well-
established element of the repertoire. Secondly, there are quotations that
are tolerated (but not forbidden): for instance quotes in French or less
often in other esteemed vernacular languages such as Italian. Apparently,
the (socio-)cultural status of these languages is great enough for quotations
to be permissible in the neo-Latin repertoire, although they have not
attained the status of Ancient Greek.
When we consider the same literary practice in seventeenth-century
neo-Latin correspondence from the Northern Netherlands, we see that
Dutch literary quotations had been slowly evolving diagonally in the
semiotic square, from prohibition towards non-prohibition. On
28 November 1644, Willem de Groot (1597–1662), brother of the
famous jurist Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) wrote the following passage in
a letter:
Res regis Britanniae peiore iam loco sunt quam antea. Vellem esse verum
quod nuper Vond(eli)us cecinit:
Dit huys sal u verduyren,
En Lo(n)den eerst sien treuren sonder muyren,
De vloet met puyn gevult,
Eer ghij ’t gesach van Karel kneusen sult.37
The situation of the British king is worse than before. Would that what
Vondel sang recently were true:
This house will endure
And will sooner see London weep without walls
And the water filled with rubble
than you will damage Charles’ power.38

37
Grotius correspondence, n 7169 (digital edition in http://grotius.huygens.knaw.nl/letters/7169/).
38
My translation: the quote is from Vondel’s Klaghte over de weerspannelingen in Groot Britanje
(‘Complaint about the revolutionaries in Great Britain’, 1644).
 Neo-Latin Literature and the Vernacular 45
In the passage de Groot uses a Dutch quotation from the work of the
Amsterdam playwright Joost Van den Vondel. No doubt this is still an
unusual example, but Dutch literary quotations were apparently being
gradually admitted into the neo-Latin repertoire, especially in the case of
an author who was rapidly gaining canonical status in the ever more
important vernacular literary system. The number of bilingual letters,
sometimes with code-switching from Latin to Dutch and vice versa, was
already also on the rise, and the fusion of Latin and vernacular elements in
epistolography continued to increase in the eighteenth century. Obviously
this change has to do with the changed sociocultural status of the vernacu-
lar language, which in turn can be interpreted within Holland’s struggle
for independence from Habsburg Spain and the cultural emancipation of
mercantile bourgeois society in the wealthy Northern Provinces. In this
way, this interpretation also connects the dynamics of the literary system to
that of other adjacent systems, such as the political and the social.
This case shows how useful the notion of normativity and the interpret-
ation of it in the semiotic square can be when considering both the
synchrony and the diachrony of the neo-Latin and vernacular literary
systems. Not only does it allow us to analyze the practice of literary
quotation as a part of the neo-Latin literary repertoire which is bound to
normative rules of the system, it also makes it possible to interpret the
changes of that literary system and the interference from concurrent
systems, in this case the vernacular, and the influence of adjacent systems
such as the political and social. The possibilities of such a hermeneutical
tool are extensive. First, there are many similar models of poetic repertoire,
and options within it that can be analyzed in this way when dealing with
the relationship of neo-Latin and vernacular literature. One further
example would be that of ‘liminary’ poems, such as prefatory or conclud-
ing dedicatory or panegyric verse. While the neo-Latin repertoire will in
many cases prohibit vernacular liminary material of this sort, unless it has
canonical value in the neo-Latin system (like French liminary poems in the
seventeenth-century Dutch literary system), it almost always allows Greek
liminary poetry. The vernacular repertoire on the other hand will allow
both Latin or Greek and vernacular liminary poems as poetic options,
provided the vernacular in question is the mother tongue. This last
example also demonstrates that we can use these ideas to consider vernacu-
lar literary repertoires and interference from the neo-Latin system, a
ubiquitous phenomenon when contrasting neo-Latin literature with the
various vernacular cultures that practice it. Secondly, there is no limit to
the level of interference we can consider by taking normativity as a starting
46 tom deneire
point. For instance, it is possible not only to conceptualize the influence of
vernacular sayings on Erasmus’ Latin idiomatic expressions,39 but also to
consider the link between vernacular visual culture and the increasingly
popular genre of bilingual or multilingual emblem literature, or consider
quite large issues such as the influence of the Reformation on the steady
vernacularization of the Renaissance literary polysystem.

Neo-Latin and Vernacular Repertoires

Another key element, besides normativity, that has recurred repeatedly in
the above discussion is the notion of ‘repertoire’.40 Whether we are
describing processes and procedures within a system or interference
between different systems, we often do so by observing the laws and
elements of literary repertoires. As already indicated, a literary repertoire
is the aggregate of laws and elements that govern the making and use of a
literary product and ‘while some of these laws and elements seem to be
universally valid since the world’s first literatures, clearly a great many laws
and elements are subjected to shifting conditions in different periods and
cultures’.41 These laws and elements can be single or bound elements, or
complete models in the literary repertoire. Accordingly, Even-Zohar dis-
tinguishes three distinct levels in the system’s repertoire: of individual
elements, of syntagms and of models. Roughly stated the first includes
single disparate items, the second any combination up to the level of a
sentence, and the third any potential portion of a whole product.42 For our
purposes, this distinction has the interpretive potential to analyze both
synchronically and diachronically the composition of the literary reper-
toire, and the interference between the neo-Latin and vernacular system.
On the level of individual elements we can, for instance, note the transfer
of vernacular morphemes into the neo-Latin repertoire in so-called ‘maca-
ronic’ literature, i.e. texts written in a mixture of Latin and the vernacular,
usually with vernacular words with Latinized inflexions.43 Scottish
examples include the macaronic poetry of William Drummond
(1585–1649), who opens a poem with the line Nymphae, quae colitis high-
issima monta Fifaea (‘Nymphs, who dwell upon the highest mountains of
Fife’) and goes on to write Per costam, et scopulis Lobster manifootus in udis /

39
Cf. Wesseling 2002.
40
For more information, see Even-Zohar 1990: 39–43; 2010: 16–34, 70–6 and 175–84. For a prolonged
discussion of neo-Latin vs. vernacular repertoire, see Deneire 2014e: 33–58.
41 42
Even-Zohar 1990: 17–18; see also Even-Zohar 1990: 39. Even-Zohar 1990: 41.
43
On which, see IJsewijn and Sacré 1998: 136–8.
 Neo-Latin Literature and the Vernacular 47
creepat (‘along the coast and on wet rocks the many-footed lobster creeps’);
or a liminary poem for George Ruggle’s (1575–1622) Ignoramus (‘We are
unaware’, 1615), which begins:
Non inter Plaios gallantos et bene gaios,
est alter Bookus deservat qui modo lookos,
o Lector Friendleie, tuos: hunc buye libellum.
Among the gallant and gayest Plays
there is no other Book that deserves so much as one look
by you, o Friendly Reader: buy this booklet.44
A similar example of analyzing repertoires at the level of morphemes can be
applied to the well-known Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (‘Poliphilo’s Strife of
Love in a Dream’, 1499), generally believed to be authored by Francesco
Colonna (1433/4–1527), and written in a vocabulary created from Latin,
Greek, and the vernaculars from Italy, organized through Latin syntax.45
The case of macaronic literature brings us to the level of syntagms, since
cases of code-switching, i.e. the concurrent use of more than one language,
are also sometimes called macaronic. We have already indicated that this can
appear in letters. A good example of the phenomenon is the French and
Latin bilingualism of Jean Du Bellay’s correspondence, which results in
sentences of the sort: ‘Je vous asseure bien que le Pape a prins la chose
comme il debvoit et qu’il est magno et infracto animo; faciat tantum Deus
ne isti nobis antevertant.’ (‘I assure you that the Pope has taken the issue as
he should have and that he is of great and unbroken spirit; God only grant us
that those people do not precede us.’)46 The phenomenon is not restricted
to epistolography, however, but is found in drama and scientific literature as
well.47 Drama was apparently particularly susceptible to vernacular influ-
ence, as is evident by the insertion of vernacular words into Latin plays in
early neo-Latin literature or the later evolution towards bilingual or even
multilingual plays, as in the Polish author Gregorius Cnapius (c. 1564–1638).
Finally, this trend extended even to the practice of writing two versions of a
play, one in Latin and one in the vernacular, as is the case with the German
sixteenth-century author Sixtus Betuleius (1501–54).48
This brings us to the last level in the repertoire, that of models. This is
the most productive for the scholar of literature, as the notion of the
‘model’ is a broad one: ‘(t)here is no need to attempt classification
according to the level of the “model,” since (t)here may be models in

44 45 46
Sandys 1831: xxi–xxii. Translation mine. Cf. Trippe 2002: 1229. Amherdt 2009: 62.
47 48
See e.g. Crespo and Moskowich 2006. IJsewijn and Sacré 1998: 147–9.
48 tom deneire
operation for a whole possible text . . . yet there may also be specific models
for a segment, or portion, of this whole’.49 In this way, the notion of
models in the literary repertoire is closely associated with other traditional
concepts of literary typology such as style or genre. In this context, we can
point at intricate examples of cultural transfer, as when Italian vernacular
lyric poetry, most notably Petrarchism, provided models for erotic poetry
in the French neo-Latin literature of the sixteenth century, which in turn
came to influence French vernacular writing. As a result, we find in the
writers of the Pléiade, a few decades later, a far-reaching symbiosis of Latin
and French poetic traditions, significantly within the context of trying to
raise ‘the status of a classically inspired, deliberately elitist French poetry, in
rivalry with the best compositions of Italy’.50 In a similar vein, in the early
seventeenth century the bilingual Dutch writers Daniel Heinsius
(1580–1655) and Hugo Grotius introduced the classical, Latin model of
Senecan tragedy into their neo-Latin dramas, which in turn influenced the
vernacular dramatic production of authors like Vondel.51 In Vondel’s case
we can even witness this process of transfer first hand through his transla-
tion of two of Grotius’ plays: both Grotius’ Sophompaneas and Vondel’s
Dutch translation of the play appeared in 1635, and nearly thirty years later
he turned once again to Grotius’ Latin drama, adapting Adamus Exul
(1601) as Adam in ballingschap (‘Adam in Exile’, 1664).
Another example is the stylistic development of vernacular prose. Indeed,
the impact of the study of classical Latin on the vernacular prose of an author
like Thomas More (1478–1535) is quite evident. In his English Richard III,
for instance, classical literature has influenced the diction, rhetoric and even
the book’s philosophical outlook.52 However, we can also trace stylistic
transfers of larger dimensions. It is clear, for instance, that both classical
(Seneca) and neo-Latin (Marc-Antoine Muret, 1526–82 and Justus Lipsius,
1547–1606) models of an anti-Ciceronian prose style had an important
influence on the development of national prose styles, shaping such pivotal
and various vernacular authors as Francis Bacon (1561–1626),53 Francisco de
Quevedo (1580–1645) or René Descartes (1596–1650).54
Such examples of the interference between the neo-Latin and vernacular
systems demonstrate that we tend to pay particular attention to the transfer
of (neo-)Latin models to the vernacular repertoires in the period discussed.
The direction of influence, however, is not always so clear-cut. In the

49 50 51
Even-Zohar 1990: 41. Ford 2010b: 94. Smits-Veldt 1994: 16.
52 53
Carroll 1996: 252. For more information, see Deneire 2014c.
54
Cf. Burke and Po-Chia Hsia 2007; Even-Zohar 1990: 45–51 and 73–8.
 Neo-Latin Literature and the Vernacular 49
aforementioned case of anti-Ciceronianism, we can note that the French
writer Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) also functioned as a model for
vernacular Anti-Ciceronian style, which means that this interference
cannot be seen as an Einbahnstraße from neo-Latin to the vernacular.
Similarly, the case of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili not only shows lin-
guistic fusion of classical and vernacular languages, but also of vernacular,
classical Latin (Plautus, Apuleius) and neo-Latin (Leon Battista Alberti,
1404–72) stylistic models.55 Furthermore, there were also many translations
made of medieval and contemporary vernacular literature into Latin in the
early modern era – a rather neglected element of humanist literature, that
was especially important in the German-speaking world, as a way to
popularize books originally written in romance languages.56
A final example, also involving translation, of the interference between
systems on the level of the model may illustrate the level of complexity
such cultural exchange can reach. The case in question is the German
reception of Heinsius’ Lof-sanck van Jesus Christus (‘Hymn for Christ’)
(1616). Published as part of his Nederduytsche Poemata (‘Dutch Poetry’),
this hymn is part of his lyric output in the vernacular, which Heinsius – a
professor of Greek at Leiden University and a prolific poet in the classical
languages – modeled after classical poetics in order to create (or perpetuate,
following the activities of authors like Janus Dousa (1545–1604), Jan Van
Hout and P. C. Hooft) a humanist vernacular poetry in Holland’s national
language.57 Here we see an initial situation of (double) interference:
Heinsius attempted to influence the vernacular system by introducing
items and models from the Latin repertoire (both classical and neo-Latin),
supplemented by items and models from the French polysystem as mani-
fested in the Pléiade-poets, like Du Bellay, Pierre Ronsard (1524–85) and
Du Bartas, whose bilingual poetry, i.e. Latin and classicizing French,
served as a clear example for people like Dousa and Heinsius.
In this respect, Heinsius’ vernacular poetry (together with other models
like Grotius) then had an important influence on the emerging vernacular
poetry in the German-speaking countries, who mirrored the Dutch religious
situation and also tried to use national poetry in the context of building a
Kulturnation.58 The German author Martin Opitz committed himself to
this project and accordingly translated several of Heinsius’ vernacular
poems, including his aforementioned hymn for Christ, which was published

55 56
McLaughlin 1996: 238–9. Burke 2007a: 71.
57
Cf. Becker-Contarino 1983; Meter 1984; Lefèvre and Schäfer 2008.
58
Cf. Van Ingen 1981; Jordan 2003.
50 tom deneire
as Lobgesang Jesu Christi (‘Hymn for Christ’) in 1624.59 Here we have a
second case of interference, namely the transfer of models from the Dutch
vernacular repertoire to the emerging German vernacular system; indeed
translation is often observed when a literary system is young.60 However,
Heinsius did not only serve as a model for vernacular poetry; his large poetic
output in the classical languages also influenced the German humanist
authors. Indeed, Opitz published many Latin poems as well.
So in the context of the continuing canonical status of Latin poetry in
the German polysystem, we can understand why in 1635 Martin Nessel
(1607–73) might translate Opitz’ German translation of Heinsius’ Dutch
Lof-sanck van Jesus Christus into Latin under the (convoluted, but pertin-
ent) title Danielis Heinsii Hymnus Jesu Christo, Unico Et Vero Dei Filio,
Belgice Conscriptus, postea Germanice redditus a Martino Opitio Silesio, nunc
Latine a Martino Nesselio Moravo (‘Daniel Heinsius’ Hymn for Christ, the
One and True Son of God, written in Dutch, later on translated into
German by Martin Opitz from Silesia, and now into Latin by Martin
Nessel from Moravia’). Here we have arrived at a third case of interference,
where the German vernacular system interferes with the German neo-
Latin system. Yet to understand this last case, it is clear that we need to put
it within the context of the earlier interference of the authoritative Dutch
vernacular model, which in turn needs to be interpreted in view of other
authoritative models, i.e. the classical tradition, neo-Latin models and the
French bilingual system, and to take into account a number of factors from
adjacent systems to the literary, i.e. ‘nationalistic’ tendencies, religious
factors, political motivations and so on.

Conclusion
In the end, it seems that while there is a dominant movement in the cultural
exchange between the neo-Latin and vernacular systems, which runs from
the neo-Latin axis towards the vernacular, we should be quick to warn
against a reductionist interpretation of this cultural exchange. Many of the
examples above have shown how neo-Latin and vernacular repertoires
intermingle in quite complex intercultural dynamics and many humanist
writers, for instance Petrarch or Milton, represent a true fusion or syncre-
tism of these repertoires.61 Many authors wrote both in neo-Latin and their

59 60
Cf. Muth 1872; Bornemann 1976. Even-Zohar 1990: 47–8.
61
On Milton’s ‘humanist syncretism’, see e.g. Loewenstein 1996: 275–6. On Petrarch’s classical/
vernacular fusion, see e.g. McLaughlin 1996: 225–8.
 Neo-Latin Literature and the Vernacular 51
native tongue, and sometimes even composed and printed poems in two
versions: one in Latin and one in the vernacular. On this situation in
seventeenth-century England, Joseph Loewenstein has eloquently stated:
Taken singly, these poems draw on a variety of imperfectly compatible
learned traditions, a tense and gnomic semantic field. But the pairings
exacerbate this lively tension, for the Latin and English versions of these
poems compete for semantic priority and, by their rivalry, challenge the
very idea of the poem as singular, stable and univocal. We have here the
perfect emblems of the nervously productive interplay between Latinity and
Englishness within mid seventeenth century literary culture.62
In the end, we can conclude that the juxtaposition of neo-Latin and
vernacular literatures in the early modern era produces a similar tension,
where both literatures compete for cultural priority, which challenges our
ideas of the study of neo-Latin texts as a singular and stable literature. In
this respect, one can only stress the great importance for those reading neo-
Latin literature of remaining attentive to the processes of stratification,
canonization, interference and transfer, both on an intra-systemic and an
inter-systemic level, and extending in the latter case as far as other
literatures or other cultural systems such as politics, society and religion.
Only then can we hope to achieve an informed reading of the unique
corpus that is neo-Latin literature.

FURTHER READING
The body of work dealing with matters of neo Latin and the vernacular is quite
large and can seem overwhelming. An overview of the different scholarly fields
(linguistic, literary and historical) that deal with the question can be found in
Deneire 2014a and Verbeke 2015. There are a number of interesting collections of
case studies available, discussing neo Latin and vernacular literature either in one
national context (Taylor and Coroleu 1999 for Spain, Castor and Cave 1984 for
France) or throughout Renaissance Europe (Guthmüller 1998, Thurn 2012,
Bloemendal 2015). However, these studies tend to be comparative in perspective
without focusing specifically on the issue of cultural exchange and mobility. For
the latter, one can turn to Deneire 2014e or to more general works in the fields of
translation studies (Hermans 1999 and 2002) or cultural transfer (Burke and Po
Chia Hsia 2007 and North 2009). As for methodology per se, Even Zohar 1990
and 2010 (both available online at www.tau.ac.il/~itamarez/) is the best starting
point for polysystem theory. Finally, a good general introduction into the
complex interplay of neo Latin and vernacular culture is available in Burke 1991
and Burke 2004 (see also the more historical IJsewijn 1990).

62
Loewenstein 1996: 276–7.
 chapter 3

How the Young Man Should Study Latin Poetry

Neo-Latin Literature and Early Modern Education
Sarah Knight

‘In the art of poetry there is much that is pleasant and nourishing for the
mind of a youth, but quite as much that is disturbing and misleading,
unless in the hearing of it he have proper oversight.’1 The Greek historian,
philosopher and teacher Plutarch (c. 46–c. 120), one of the first to com-
ment on the relationship between poetry and education, suggests that
studying poetry can destabilize the young man’s character unless carefully
handled and effectively taught. During the Renaissance, Plutarch’s essay
was mainly known by a Latin title – Quomodo adolescens poetas audire
debeat (‘How the Young Man Should Listen to Poetry’)2 – which fore-
grounds concerns with correct pedagogical method, the moral responsi-
bility of the learner (implied by that modal debeat – ‘should’) and his
developmental stage as an adolescens, a youth whose mind was still being
formed, and all three concerns were regularly debated across Europe in the
fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Plutarch discusses how the first-century student should listen to poetry,
but our focus will be on how early modern students were taught to read
and write – and imitate, paraphrase, translate, analyse and dissect – poetry
as part of the education they received, and how some of the more
imaginative Latinists went on to reflect on that process in poems of their
own. Classroom tutors, educational theorists and students would answer
a loud ‘no’ to the question posed by Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) in
De pueris instituendis (‘On Educating Boys’, c. 1509): ‘shall we, then, allow
the best years of your life to pass by without bearing the fruits of a literary
education?’,3 but general agreement that such work was important did not
lead to uniformity of pedagogical arguments. Erasmus, the Italian human-
ists Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72), Pier Paolo Vergerio (c. 1370–1444),
Enea Silvio (Aeneas Silvius) Bartolomeo Piccolomini (1405–64) and the

1
Plutarch, Moralia, 15b. Babbitt 1927: 77–9; Hunter and Russell 2011: 31–2.
2 3
See Hunter and Russell 2011: 1–2 on textual transmission. Erasmus 1985: 343.

52
 Neo-Latin Literature and Early Modern Education 53
English teacher and curate John Brinsley (bap. 1566–c. 1624) were among
those eager to clarify how youths should study, although their views on the
study of poetry differ as much as we might expect over three centuries and
across a continent. The debate expanded from educational treatises into
poetic representations, and although no coherent picture of Renaissance
education emerges from the poems which depict it – understandably,
given the range of religious denominations, nationalities, ideologies and
literary agendas – what these poets share is the acquisition of Latin as a
learned language and, apparently, the compulsion to write about it, from
the perspectives of both pedagogue and student. The act of writing
prompted these poets to think hard about the cachet and flexibility of
Latin as a literary language compared with the vernacular, perhaps because
they were intimately engaged in manipulating a language not their own
into poetic form, a task demanding dogged attention to verbal detail rather
than abstract pedagogical theorizing.
Early modern poetry about education takes many forms, and this
chapter will examine several examples from across Europe of how Latin
poets represented institutional experience and pedagogy. The France-based
humanists Nicolas Bourbon (1503–1550) and George Buchanan (1506–82)
write about the tutor’s role, while an epigram by the solicitous father
Ugolino Verino (1438–1516) urges his son to work hard: his pious teenage
son Michele (1469–87) responds by writing a series of moral distichs.
The German Reformation firebrand Ulrich von Hutten (1488–1523) rep-
resents a local quarrel over Hebrew learning as a Roman triumph, with
young students playing a central role in this humanist controversy; the
French jurist Nicolas Petit (c. 1497–1532) dramatizes in mock-heroic vein
violent reactions to overflowing sewers between Paris colleges; the
German Helius Eobanus Hessus (Eoban Koch, 1488–1540) presents him-
self as a teenage Latin prodigy; the Polish Klemens Janicki (1516–43)
muses on early epiphanies and literary hero-worship as a young reader;
the French Marc-Antoine Muret (1526–85) publishes his Juvenilia
heralded by paratexts which exalt his talent; the English John Milton
(1608–74) muses on institutional contexts and parental interventions into
the educational process. Such poems present more elusive perspectives on
academic experience than those offered by institutional statutes and
schoolteachers’ manuals, but if we accept that authors choose to emphasize
particular aspects of education over others, then that choice becomes
significant and revealing: fictional or semi-fictional accounts, even if not
historically ‘true’, still disclose what their authors thought important
to represent.
54 sarah knight
Over half a century ago Walter J. Ong wrote of ‘the complex social
implications of Latin as a learned language’, and more recently, Joseph
Farrell and Françoise Waquet have written of the interactions between
Latin acquisition, education and social formation.4 Schooling starts early in
life, would-be poets often start to write creatively during their education,
and so it is not surprising that these writers dwell on the significance of such
implications and interactions, particularly in relation to the development of
an individual literary voice. At a time when pedagogy was universally
conducted in Latin, that voice often spoke bilingually. For burgeoning
speakers and writers, educational success depended on confidence and
facility in Latin, and as readers, too, Latin was often learned before the
vernacular. Yet Latin was always mediated because it was learned academ-
ically: during the Renaissance it became, as Farrell has argued, ‘the paradig-
matically dead language’.5 Pedagogical systems and institutional contexts
channelled how the young man interacted with this academically inculcated
language, compared with how fluently and reciprocally he might interact
with the vernacular world he inhabited outside his formal schooling.
Exceptionally, Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) spoke only Latin at
home until he was six (Essais 1.26),6 but most pupils had their first
encounter with the language at around six or seven.7 Some theorists held
that education should begin even earlier: in De liberorum educatione
(‘On the Education of Boys’), Enea Silvio Piccolomini argues that [f]uisset
igitur ab ipsis cunabulis incipiendum (‘training should begin in the very
cradle’).8 However early it actually began, Latinity garnered from school-
age onwards generally aimed to separate the boy from the world of
vernacular (often female-centred) domesticity and to propel him into the
world of institutions (education, law, politics), in which a good working
knowledge of Latin was paramount. Some educationalists feared that
domesticity would stunt development: ‘[w]hat kind of maternal feeling is
it that induces some women to keep their children clinging to their skirts
until they are six years old and to treat them as imbeciles?’ asked Erasmus
in De pueris instituendis.9 This concern stems from boys’ perceived suscep-
tibility to external influences, manifest in Plutarch’s concern that the
adolescens might be diverted from the ‘pleasant and nourishing’ by the
‘disturbing and misleading’,10 but also implies a new worry particular to

4 5 6
Ong 1959: 107; Farrell 2001; Waquet 2001. Farrell 2001: 121. Montaigne 1957: 128.
7 8
Baldwin 1944: 1, 285–6. Kallendorf 2002: 28–9.
9
Erasmus 1985: 309; for women learning Latin see Stevenson 2005.
10
Plutarch, Moralia, 15b; Babbitt 1927: 77–9.
 Neo-Latin Literature and Early Modern Education 55
Renaissance pedagogues. In a world where Latin was not universally used,
despite its dominance in certain contexts, feminized domesticity, poten-
tially pernicious in its own right, becomes even more menacing when
understood as vernacular, un-Latinate, and un-improving,11 and the edu-
cational institution, personified by the teacher, becomes all-important for
the formation of character and mind.
Some poems exemplify these institutional efforts at character-building,
offering varied (if not always scintillating) perspectives from young men
writing as responsible citizens and obedient subjects. This kind of
educational poetry is occasional, public, intended to commemorate events
important to an institution’s life such as the death of a monarch, and
therefore reflecting a kind of ideological orthodoxy. When Elizabeth
I visited the University of Oxford in 1566, for example, students and scholars
packaged their Latinity for her, delivering speeches throughout her journey
through the city, staging academic debates, physically festooning the walls
with polyglot poetry, and presenting her with manuscripts of multi-authored
panegyric verse, such as that authored by members of Magdalen College;
just as, when she had visited Windsor in 1563, Eton schoolboys had similarly
presented their Latin poetry to her.12 But institutional feeling could also
manifest itself as aggressive rather than as orthodox and polite. Early
immersion in a highly competitive, patriarchal and homosocial system might
account for some poets’ representations of schooling as a kind of warfare,
conjuring up thoughts of Waterloo and Eton playing-fields, and Lindsay
Anderson’s If . . . (1968). An educational experience powered by conflict
rather than conformity is evoked through hard-fought academic battles, and
at the same time the impulsiveness and energy associated with youth,
personified by dynamic adolescent protagonists, animate the verse.
Sometimes the intention of institutionally minded poetry is ideologic-
ally serious: Ulrich von Hutten’s 1517 poem ‘Triumphus Doctoris Reu-
chlini’ (‘Dr Reuchlin’s Triumph’), a lively defence of the efforts of his
mentor, the German scholar Johann Reuchlin (1455–1522), to counter local
burnings of Hebrew texts by zealous Dominicans, taps into contemporary
humanist efforts to emphasize that there were not one but three linguae
sacrae (Greek, Latin and Hebrew). Von Hutten represents such humanist
idealism as a multi-generational concern, urging Huc, iuvenes, huc ite, senes,
celebrate triumphum (‘Go, young men, go, elders, celebrate the triumph’,
40), but in the poem the iuvenes in particular act as a kind of army,
carrying off their spoils as if in a Roman triumph (382–5):
11 12
Wall 1998: 1–45; Farrell 2001: 52–83. Nichols 2014: 1.546–72.
56 sarah knight
In a packed procession and in their chariot they approached.
First the young men bore pictures, standards, colossi,
The cowardly weapons of the conquered and the instruments
Picked from the men by stealth.13

Von Hutten’s triumphal imagery gains power from its authentically

‘Roman’ linguistic medium. His use of Latin exalts a local academic
wrangle and makes it seem historically momentous as Reuchlin the scholar
becomes a victorious general of his young student-troops mobilized under
his banner of ecumenical humanism.
Sometimes, though, institutional wrangles are more subversively
depicted, deflated by hyberbole which calls attention to the relative petti-
ness of what is at stake. In Nicolas Petit’s mock-epic Barbaromachia (1522)
we again see scholarly battle being joined, this time between the students
of two of the most illustrious collèges of the University of Paris, the
Collège de Montaigu (where Erasmus had studied) and the Collège
Sainte-Barbe (where George Buchanan was to teach). Petit, rector of the
Law Faculty at Poitiers, chronicles the violence between collegians
prompted by their reactions to the overflowing of sewers between their
colleges.14 The excitability of the students is crucial for the poem’s sense of
urgency: the iuuentus (‘group of young people’) look on (sig. Miijr)
and ‘exalt’ (extollebat) what they see, and they occupy a ‘battle-ground’
(campum) (sig. Niv). Although Petit’s militarized collegians recall Von
Hutten’s student-soldiers deployed for theological polemic, Petit draws
attention to comic incongruity, alluding to Lucan’s and Virgil’s accounts
of terrifying bloodshed to make this grotesque and pungent skirmish in an
inkhorn corner of Paris seem insignificant, only mock-heroic in its force.
It is worth considering how poetry was actually taught. Françoise
Waquet has argued for a ‘universal canon’ of Latin poets studied in
Renaissance schools, including Terence, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid, and
a few neo-Latinists such as Baptista Spagnuoli Mantuan (1448–1516).15
Although we see local variation, the contours of reading can to some
extent be traced.16 Poetics was not part of the trivium (grammar, logic

13
Böcking 1862: 3.412–47 (427): Iam celebri pompa spoliis curruque propinquunt. / Prima uehunt iuuenes
tabulasque et signa colossosque / Armaque deuinctorum imbellia sumptaque furtim / Instrumenta uiris.
This passage also excerpted in Laurens 2004: 174.
14 15
Petit 1522; Chartier, Julia, and Compère 1976: 152–3. Waquet 2001: 33–4.
16
Influential studies include (England) Baldwin 1944; Clarke 1959; Mack 2002: 11–47; (France)
Barnard 1922; Chartier, Julia, and Compère 1976; Lebrun, Venard, and Quéniart 1981, vol. ii;
(Italy) Black 2005; Grendler 1989; for pan-European studies, see Grafton and Jardine 1986; Waquet
2001.
 Neo-Latin Literature and Early Modern Education 57
and rhetoric), but was nonetheless intimately connected with all of its
branches, particularly rhetoric, since ultimately all forms of composition
are based on rhetorical divisions: inventio (coming up with a subject),
dispositio (organizing the discussion) and elocutio (delivering or articulat-
ing the work). Educationalists differed as to how important poetry was:
all agreed that it was pleasurable but some felt it could also be morally
serious. In De ingenuis moribus et liberalibus adulescentiae studiis liber
(‘The Character and Studies Befitting a Free-Born Youth’) (written
c. 1402–3), Pier Paolo Vergerio argues that ‘poetics [poetica], even if it
contributes a great deal to the life and speech [ad vitam et ad orationem]
of those who study it, nevertheless seems more suited to pleasure
[ad delectationem]’.17 Vergerio associates poetry with the ars musicae (art
of music), and figures it as a gentlemanly leisure pursuit rather than as a
skill to be systematically inculcated. Others thought differently: following
Plutarch, in De Pueris Instituendis Erasmus cites various poetic modes
(pastoral, comic, epic) as means of conveying a moral message appealingly
to children, and Philip Sidney made a similar claim in his Defense of
Poesy (c. 1580).18 Reading, translating and composing poetry could stimu-
late pleasure, eloquence or moral formation, or all three, in theory.
Practical teaching manuals, on the other hand, give us some sense of
what pupils actually did in the classroom. In Ludus Literarius: Or, the
Grammar Schoole (1612), John Brinsley presents a ‘Discourse between two
Schoolemasters’, Spoudeus and Philoponus. Philoponus’ aim is ‘that [the
pupils] bee able in manner to write true Latine’ (‘without bodging’, the
margin sternly notes), ‘and a good phrase in prose, before they begin to
meddle with making a verse.’19 To help them ‘make verses’ (p. 192), pupils
need to ‘haue read some poetry first; as at least these books or the like, or
some part of them, viz. Ouid de Tristibus, or de Ponto, some peace of his
Metamorphosis or of Virgil, and be well acquainted with their Poeticall
phrases’. Pupils and teachers alike are reminded of poetry’s relationship
with the trivium: ‘For the making of a verse, is nothing but the turning of
words forth of the Grammaticall order, into the Rhetoricall, in some kinde
of metre; which wee call verses.’ Boys should be able to learn composition
quickly: ‘they will be in a good way towards the making a verse, before
they haue learned any rules therof’. Having mastered this first technique,
they should then ‘be made very cunning in the rules of versifying’, and
become ‘expert in scanning a verse, and in prouing euery quantity,
according to their rules, and so vse to practice in their lectures [readings]
17 18 19
Kallendorf 2002: 52–3. Erasmus 1985: 336. Brinsley 1612: 192.
58 sarah knight
daily’. Like many Renaissance pedagogues, Brinsley advocates that pupils
compile ‘common place’ lists of citations to help them learn Latin, increase
their vocabulary and improve their compositional skills, selecting some
Ovid citations from a ‘Flores Poetarum . . . and in euery Common place
make choise of Ouids verses, or if you find any other which be pleasant
and easie’ (p. 193), next ‘write downe all the words in Latine verbatim, or
Grammatically’, thirdly ‘having iust the same the same words, let them trie
which of them can soonest turne them into the order of a verse’. Pupils
should constantly compare their writing with that of the original Latin
text, to see where they ‘haue made the very same; or wherin they missed:
this shall much incourage and assure them’.
Brinsley’s manual is brisk yet compassionate, seeking what would be
‘pleasant and easie’ for the schoolboy amidst the drilling. Unlike earlier
pedagogues writing within the ‘mirror for princes’ tradition, he accepts
that not all of his pupils will go on to further study and may need only the
vernacular in their professional lives, reflecting the fact that between the
fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, school education at least became more
widely available. Brinsley writes in the vernacular while earlier educational
theorists had written mainly in Latin and he targets provincial grammar-
school boys rather than aristocratic youths and princes. Yet although
educational opportunities were growing, many common factors can be
found between (for instance) Erasmus’ De Pueris and Brinsley: translating,
parsing, common-placing and canonical readings were all central to how
early modern youths were taught to approach poetry.
Far from the ideal schoolmasters we find in Brinsley and Erasmus is the
tutor-poet who ventriloquizes George Buchanan’s first elegy, most likely
written when he was teaching at the Collège Sainte-Barbe in the late 1520s.
Its title, ‘How wretched is the state of those teaching classical literature in
Paris’ (Quam misera sit conditio docentium literas humaniores Lutetiae),
unambiguously heralds an artful chronicle of literary woe, as creativity
yields to pedagogy: ‘farewell barren Muses’ (sterilesque valete Camenae, 1).20
Although ‘we have spent our early years with you’, the effort involved has
made him old before his time (11–14):
Ante diem curvos senium grave contrahit artus,
Imminet ante suum mors properata diem:
Ora notat pallor, macies in corpore toto est,
Et tetrico in vultu mortis imago sedet.

20
Elegia i: Ruddiman 1715: 301; also in Perosa and Sparrow 1979: 512–13.
 Neo-Latin Literature and Early Modern Education 59
Before its proper time, heavy age has warped the limbs,
On rushing death looms before its proper time;
Paleness shows on the face, the body is withered all over,
The image of death sits on the hideous countenance.

To convey the obsessive thought patterns of the overworked, Buchanan

uses repetition to structure his couplets: this physical deterioration, he tells
us twice, is ante diem, agonizingly and jarringly premature, and death is
not only looming (imminet) but takes up residence (sedet).
Before our sympathy gets too acute, however, it becomes clear that the
speaker – as well as melodramatically lamenting the effects of ‘overmuch
study’, in the Jacobean scholar Robert Burton’s phrase – is also showing off
his reading. Buchanan’s elegy is indebted to Juvenal’s seventh satire on the
economic difficulties of the over-educated but under-valued, when ‘old
age, eloquent but poverty-stricken, hates itself and its Muse’ (7.34–5).21 So
the poet paradoxically damns poetry whilst demonstrating how much
poetry he has read, and demonstrates how deeply learning has been incul-
cated, even as he apparently chafes under educational strictures.
Other tutor-poets favour a more moralizing tone. Nicolas Bourbon’s
address to his former pupils, Opusculum puerile ad pueros de moribus sive
Παιδαγωγεῖον (‘Boyish Minor Work for Boys on the Subject of Morals, or
Paedagogion’) (1536) extols the importance of a teacher’s influence; invited,
most probably, by the francophile Anne Boleyn to teach a class of aristo-
cratic ten-year-olds at Henry VIII’s court, Bourbon represents the task as
divinely and parentally appointed rather than as patron-brokered:
Vos Deus ipse mihi, vestrique dedere parentes,
Non ob Grammaticen, Rhetoricen modo,
Verum etiam ut mores sub me discatis honestos:
Est mihi commisi cura gerenda gregis.
God himself, and your parents, gave you to me
Not only for Grammar and Rhetoric,
But so that you could learn virtuous morals under me:
The care of managing the flock has been given to me.22
For Bourbon, teaching is important not only because it delivers grammat-
ical and rhetorical training required by the trivium, nor just for its moral
dimension (honestos mores), but because of the religious vocational dimen-
sions of the work: ‘God himself’ has given him the job, and his duty is that

21
Braund 2004: 300–1: tunc seque suamque / Terpsichoren odit facunda et nuda senectus.
22
Bourbon 1536: 15. See also Phillips 1984: 71–82 (78).
60 sarah knight
of a Christ-like (or priest-like) shepherd, his pupils are his ‘flock’. Back in
France in the mid-1530s, aiming to re-establish himself in humanist circles,
Bourbon’s poem can be read as fulfilling several purposes: he asserts his
pedagogical seriousness as an ideal Erasmian teacher, demonstrates his
poetic talent in an extended verse letter, and also, more subtly, emphasizes
his privileged involvement in the royal court arising from being entrusted
with the ‘care’ of a ‘flock’ of distinguished boys.
Bourbon’s Paedagogion fits within a longer humanist tradition of
addresses to pupils. ‘While you are still a boy, press on’ ([d]um puer
es . . . incumbe), urged the Florentine notary and poet Ugolino Verino in
an epigram to his son Michele, for ‘this time of life is suitable for all kinds
of study’ (studiis haec apta est omnibus aetas, 9–10).23 Verino appeals to his
son’s sense of family name (nomen) and reputation (fama, 3), cites the fact
that father and grandfather have been intellectually distinguished (5),
posits that ‘love of praise’ (laudis amor) should act as a spur, and argues
that adolescence is the time to fill the memory for a lifetime’s use, that
‘whatever you learn thoroughly in your adolescent years, / No length of
time will take away from you’ (quicquid iuvenilibus annis / perdisces, tollent
tempora nulla tibi, 13–14). As Plutarch had, Verino stresses that a boy is
mentally susceptible in the ‘adolescent years’, but here such receptiveness
is represented positively through his emphasis on how the youthful brain is
quick to assimilate rather than on its propensity to be misled. The paternal
advice was apparently taken to heart: only seventeen when he died,
Michele Verino published De puerorum moribus disticha in the year of
his death, having worked on the moral poems for several years. Plutarch,
one imagines, would have applauded the younger Verino’s interweaving of
poetry and moral philosophy as exemplary, and many of his contemporar-
ies depicted this teenager as highly ethical and chaste.24
Fathers and sons frequently appear in poetry about education. The
elder Verino appeals to dynastic continuity, exhorting Michele to preco-
city so that the son can take up his place within his father’s and
grandfather’s academic sphere, but in families where the son is the first
to enter formal education, schooling often means separation. When poets
consider education’s promise of social mobility, generational differences
become particularly meaningful. Klemens Janicki depicts the encounter
with classical literature as so dazzling that any other career would be
unthinkable, conjuring up a father so selflessly supportive of his clever
son that he becomes instrumental in the son’s abandonment of his
23 24
Epigrammata 1.23: see Perosa and Sparrow 1979: 91. Wilson 1997: 7–8.
 Neo-Latin Literature and Early Modern Education 61
family’s traditional occupation: he ‘did not want me to live a life of
punishing toil’ (vivere me durum noluit inter opus, 24), to turn a ‘tender
hand’ (tenera manus, 25) to a ‘lumpen plough’ (informi aratro, 25), so the
boy is sent away to be educated.25
Writing ‘Ad patrem’ (‘To Father’, c. 1631), Milton also shows how
education can separate the son from the father’s profession, but implies
that the break needs to be justified. Despite thanking – in an echo of
Horace – his pater optime (‘best of fathers’, 6) for arranging Latin and
Greek schooling tuo sumptu (‘at your expense’, 78), the speaker still feels
the need to advise his addressee not to ‘look down on divine poetry’ ([n]
ec tu . . . divinum despice carmen, 17) nor ‘condemn the holy Muses’ (sacras
contemnere Musas, 56).26 The poem is offered as a gift, education repre-
sented as a blessing, but behind all of this lies a parental question familiar
from more recent times – ‘but what are you going to do with a literature
degree?’ Offered as laudes (‘praise’) for his father, ‘Ad patrem’ perhaps
disingenuously offers filial justification where none was sought: Milton
senior, as his son observes, was himself a composer of music (56–9).
Nonetheless the poem reads as apologia as well as eulogy, and if there
was no need to offer justification to the father, the speaker still seems eager
to convince the world that the father embodies of the fact that other
professional paths (law, money-making) are secondary to a literary career,
to a Divinum carmen (‘Sacred Poem’, 17). We have seen how Bourbon
represents teaching as divinely appointed; in ‘Ad patrem’, as in ‘Elegia
sexta’ (1629), Milton makes a similar case for poetry, but the speakers of
these two iuvenilia carmina (‘youthful poems’, ‘Ad patrem’, 115) appar-
ently think that alluding to classical deities and authors will bolster
their claims to divine poetry. The narrator of Paradise Lost, in his
intention ‘to soar / Above the Aonian mount’ (1.14–15), would not make
the same argument.
Adolescence can be a time of reckless confidence or of self-conscious
timidity, with one state sometimes yielding rapidly to the next. Milton’s
early Latin poetry shifts between assurance and defensiveness, as in ‘Ad
Patrem’, and we see similar variation across other poems. Some authors
project steady, even vainglorious senses of their own talent: Eoban Koch,
for instance, extols his own precocity in the poem ‘Eobanus posteritati’
(‘Eoban to Posterity’): the Muse tells him ‘Boy from Hesse, you will be
the glory of the sacred fountain’ (Hesse puer, sacri gloria fontis eris, 98) and
he is universally loved by readers from the start: ‘the people approved
25
Tristia vii: Ćwikliński 1930. 26
Carey 1998: 155.
62 sarah knight
his selected poems’ ([c]armina . . . populus mea lecta probaret) when he was
only fifteen (clausa . . . tria lustra mihi, 99–100).27 Here, the talented
teenager aims to impress not only parents and teachers, but the populus
at large, with posteritas already in his sights. Others represent themselves as
needing to work harder to get near to the sacred fountain: Klemens Janicki
recounts the need for ‘oaths and prayers to Apollo’ (vota precesque / Phoebo,
39–40) before the god ‘wished to have insignificant me in his chorus’ ([i]
nque suo minimum vellet habere choro, 42).28 Janicki’s poem offers a compli-
cated account of the relationship between reading, self-confidence and
classicism: in its description of how classical poetry studied at the
Lubrański collegium in Poznań inspired him to become a poet, we see an
echo of Plutarch’s injunction that young men should get ‘inspiration as
well as pleasure’ from hearing poetry (Moralia 14e): ‘I first heard great
Virgil’s immortal name, and your name, blessed Ovid’ ([t]um primum
nomen magni immortale Maronis / Audivi et nomen, Naso beate, tuum, 35–6).
‘I heard’, the speaker reiterates, ‘and I began to worship, and said that – after
the gods – there is nothing greater on earth than those poets’ (Audivi, colere
incepi dixique poetis / Post divos terras maius habere nihil, 37–8). Reading
here leads to worship, but – returning to the question of authority and
confidence – such reverence implies inferiority: the classical poet is the
object of devotion, the neo-Latin poet the devotee.
For Janicki, reading Virgil and others causes a near-religious epiphany.
In other poems, Virgil is depicted as a daunting figure, exemplifying the
educational institution’s ability to inculcate learning punitively. If we
return to Buchanan’s elegy on teaching in Paris, we find a ‘fearsome
master’ (metuendus . . . magister, 39) looming over his pupils, brandishing
two weapons ‘against the boys’ (in pueros), a ‘cruel strap’ (crudeli . . .
flagello, 41) in his right hand, the ‘strong work of Virgil the great’
(magni forte Maronis opus, 42) in his left. Buchanan’s implication is that
Latin reading can be an instrument of discipline in an aggressive teacher’s
hands: the forceful adjectives attached to poet and book (magnus; fortis)
amplify the forbidding spectacle of the lash-wielding tutor, with his sol-
dierly ‘knapsack’ (mantica, 40) and his ‘long robe’ (longa veste, 39) identify-
ing him with a parade of authority figures (senators, priests, judges) able to
punish. Given Buchanan’s debt to Juvenal’s seventh satire, an extended
meditation on the uselessness of learning and the impossibility of making a
living through poetry, the elegy cannot be read as a documentary account
of classroom practice, but it is striking that ‘Virgil the great’ can be figured
27
Koch 1539: 252. 28
Tristia vii: Ćwikliński 1930.
 Neo-Latin Literature and Early Modern Education 63
as the equivalent of a ‘strap’, and although Janicki also uses the word
magnus to describe Virgil, in his poem Virgil’s greatness rests on his
‘immortal name’ rather than the great bulk of his writing, used by the
‘fearsome master’, by implication, as an alternative weapon.
Complicated attitudes towards the classical past emerge when poets
apparently hold two mutually contradictory positions simultaneously,
when ancient writing becomes both a source of pleasure for readers and
an oppressive weight for writers seeking originality. That such a contradic-
tion exists is borne out by what some early modern educationalists say
about poetry causing strain as well as pleasure for students. In Of Education
(1644), for example, Milton questions the practice of (Brinsley-like)
schoolmasters ‘forcing the empty wits of children to compose theams,
verses, and Orations, which are the acts of ripest judgement’.29 Milton’s
attitudes towards his education fluctuated, and the dissatisfaction he
articulates in middle age when writing Of Education contrasts with his
student Latin works, which revel in a young man’s well-trained Latinity,
but his concern about overtaxing children’s ‘empty wits’ was a long-
standing pedagogical concern. Over two centuries earlier, in his treatise
De commodis atque incommodis litterarum (‘On the Advantages and Disad-
vantages of Learning’), Leon Battista Alberti dwells on what strenuously
educated boys contend with: ‘those poor ones, how tired they are, how
weakened by the drawn-out tedium of reading, by great nocturnal efforts,
by excessive conscientiousness, overwhelmed by deep mental cares’.30 Two
of the ‘cares’ Alberti identifies are the struggle to find one’s own voice and
to negotiate the weight of the classical past. He mentions priscis illis divinis
scriptoribus (‘those earlier divine writers’) to illustrate the early modern
dilemma: ‘that no one in our own time, even the most learned of men,
could say it better than they did’.31
Alberti’s theoretical fears played out in compositional practice: one of the
brightest stars of the Pléiade, Pierre Ronsard (1524–85) writes of abandoning
Latin, despite having been premierement amoureux (‘in love with it first’). He
states that he prefers ‘to be better in my own language’ (mieux estre / En ma
langue) ‘than being dishonourably last after Rome’ (Que d’estre sans honneur
à Rome le dernier).32 Ronsard’s poem exemplifies what Joseph Farrell has
called the ‘poverty topos’, used by classical Latin writers when discussing

29
Dorian 1959: 366; see also Knight 2011: 156.
30
Carotti 1976: 47: Miseri illi quam sunt exhausti, languidi longo lectionum tedio, magnis vigiliis, nimia
assiduitate, ac profundis animi curis obruti.
31
Carotti 1976: 39: ut neque eam rem viro hac etate doctissimo quam iidem illi melius dicere.
32
Laumonier 1939: x, 304; see also Silver 1969: i, 20.
64 sarah knight
their language as a poor relation to Greek,33 but the topos was just as relevant
for neo-Latinists writing about latinitas and the vernacular. Not all poets
yield to it: we think again of Milton’s determination ‘to soar / Above the
Aonian mount’, but Milton attained that confidence in mid-career: younger
poets frequently show the strain of bringing their own poetic labours to
fruition while representing that same past as constrictive and daunting,
overshadowed by the ‘strong work of Virgil the great’ and his peers.
Judging by their (admittedly often ambivalent) self-representations,
many early modern Latin poets were always writing juvenilia: belated,
secondary, unaccomplished compared with ancient Greece and
Rome. Several neo-Latin poets explicitly printed work under the title
Juvenilia, such as Théodore de Bèze (1519–1605) (c. 1550) and Marc-
Antoine Muret (1552); the term both literally describes the poet’s age and
also implies immaturity, as captured in ‘Ad Patrem’ when Milton refers
to his iuvenilia carmina (‘youthful poems’) as lusus (‘games’, 115).34
A sense of neo-Latin as ‘juvenile’ compared with classical Latin is
heightened when we see how frequently new Latin writing is praised
in relation to older works, an obviously flattering comparison which
arguably stifles the newer work by not letting it speak for itself on its
own terms. A poem by one ‘Selvaggi’ which prefixes Milton’s 1645
Poemata, for instance, states that the English poet is equal to both
Homer and Virgil (utrique parem).35 Such a hyperbolic comparison
confuses our expectations before we even start reading Milton’s work,
and the enormous scale of the analogy could preclude an unmediated
response, even raising doubts in the reader’s mind: how could these
poems possibly match both Homer and Virgil? Isn’t the praise slightly
too lavish to be convincing? Similarly, Nicolas Denisot’s (1515–59) poem
at the start of Muret’s Juvenilia praises the book not for originality, but
for imitative compendiousness:
Vis, Lector, Tragici sonum cothurni,
Vis, Lector, numeros Catullianos,
Vis, Lector, numeros Tibullianos,
Vis, Lector, numeros Horatianos?
En libro tibi dat Muretus uno.
Do you want, Reader, the sound of the tragic buskin,
Do you want, Reader, Catullan metres,
Do you want, Reader, Tibullan metres,

33 34
Farrell 2001: 28. Knight 2011: 145.
35
Milton 1645: 4. See Campbell and Corns 2008: 118 for an account of ‘Selvaggi’.
 Neo-Latin Literature and Early Modern Education 65
Do you want, Reader, Horatian metres?
Look: Muret gives you these in a single book.36
Just as Milton ‘equals’ Homer and Virgil, so Muret ‘gives’ the numeros
(‘metres; rhythms’) of three Latin poets plus the sonum of the entire tragic
genre. Denisot’s anaphoric question – ‘do you want’ (vis) – and four-time
apostrophe to the Lector (‘Reader’) stretch beyond the panegyric to pull us
in, addressing us directly and making us consider which poetic models we do
want to encounter; then, in the final turn, Denisot makes it clear that we
will not have to choose: all are made available through Muret’s imitative
gifts. But what does Muret give of his own talents? Denisot does not say. We
might ask whether such extravagant panegyric as we see in the Milton and
Muret paratexts is solely to be attributed to the generic decorum of the
dedicatory poem, or whether there is a more complicated suggestion that
neo-Latin poetry can only be understood and its worth evaluated in relation
to classical Latin poetry. Given the Renaissance exaltation of imitatio as one
of a poet’s necessary skills, it would perhaps be anachronistic to assume that
a neo-Latin writer would be more flattered by being called original (in the
post-Romantic sense) than by being identified as a good classicist; on the
other hand, judging by the alternating confidence and timidity we find in
young men’s poetry, the range of attitudes and particularly the ambivalence
we often see expressed towards an education in which the reading of ancient
authors was paramount, we might argue for an emerging wish by many of
these poets to be regarded as original thinkers as well as serious students.

FURTHER READING
Two influential accounts of how Latin education and literature changed across
the language’s history are Farrell 2001 and Waquet 2001. Grafton and Jardine
1986, Haskell and Hardie 1999, and Too and Livingstone 2007 offer important
perspectives on classical and Renaissance education in theory and practice.
Particularly useful edited primary sources for early modern pedagogy are
Kallendorf 2002 and Erasmus 1985. Three anthologies which all include Latin
poems related to education are Perosa and Sparrow 1979; Mertz, Murphy and
IJsewijn 1989; and Laurens 2004. Works of educational history abound, written in
many languages and adopting numerous approaches (from institutional panegyric
to pedagogical diatribe), but the following studies discuss some of the countries
covered in this chapter: (England) Baldwin 1944, Fletcher 1956, Mack 2002;
(France) Chartier, Julia, and Compère 1976, Lebrun, Venard and Quéniart
1981; (Italy) Black 2001, Grendler 1989.

36
Muret 2009: 34–5.
 chapter 4

The Republic of Letters

Françoise Waquet

From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, men of learning felt that they
formed a community which crossed both political and religious boundar-
ies, and which came to resemble a state in its own right: the ‘Republic of
Letters’.1 We have here an intellectual phenomenon of considerable
breadth, which will be tackled in the first instance by an historical analysis
of the concept itself. This initial exploration will be followed by a study of
the social and spatial dimensions of the community. This will allow us to
situate more accurately the practices of a world which possessed an
additional unifying element in the use of a shared language: Latin.

Definition
The first occurrence of the expression ‘Republic of Letters’ so far dis-
covered dates from 1417: the phrase is found in a letter by the Venetian
humanist Francesco Barbaro congratulating Poggio Bracciolini on his
discovery of manuscripts and thanking him for his generous communi-
cation: by working for the common good (pro communi utilitate) in this
way, he deserved gratitude from the learned and was worthy of the
strongest terms of praise reserved for those who ‘have brought a thousand
aids and adornments to this Republic of Letters’ (qui huic litterariae
reipublicae plurima adjumenta atque ornamenta contulerunt).2 Respublica
litteraria is here a synonym for the communis utilitas of the learned: we
recall that the term res may signify ‘interest’, ‘utility’ or ‘benefit’, while
publicus denotes ‘public’, ‘common’ and ‘belonging to all’. But to discern
in this expression at this date the sense of a self-contained community of

1
See in general Bots and Waquet 1997. The French term savants, here translated as ‘men of learning’,
has no exact English equivalent. For consistency, ‘men of learning’ or ‘the learned’ have been used
throughout; other possible translations include ‘scholars’ and ‘intellectuals’.
2
This text is cited by Eisenstein 1980: 137, n. 287.

66
 The Republic of Letters 67
the learned would be to go too far: for that we must wait until the very end
of the seventeenth century.
In the meantime, the expression ‘Republic of Letters’, which began to
gain currency in the second third of the sixteenth century, was employed
more and more both in its Latin form and in various vernacular languages.
The term often had a broad and sometimes a rather vague meaning,
indicating men of learning, learning itself, or both of these. Pierre Bayle’s
Nouvelles de la République des Lettres offered reviews and notifications of
new works, spoke about their authors, praised the illustrious dead, and
provided information on the intellectual world in its entirety, beginning
with the changes which were taking place in the universities. In the preface
to the first volume (1684) he had specified: ‘matters of this sort belong
naturally in this work as is apparent from the title which we have given it’.3
Although this general meaning does not disappear, we find towards the
end of the seventeenth century a more specific meaning beginning to
emerge, which was probably promoted by the sense of a shared interest
in learning and by communication practices already attested in the 1417
text. In the first definitions given by dictionaries of the French language
(Richelet, 1680; Académie française, 1694), the Republic of Letters is
presented as un corps (‘a body’), mirroring the organizational structure of
the Ancien Régime society. These very brief definitions are supplemented
by more detailed descriptions which present the Republic of Letters as a
state of its own – one of universal extent which gathers a specific popula-
tion together beneath the standard of equality, freedom, truth and reason.
In 1726, the German theologian and polymath Christoph August
Heumann summarized in the following terms a view that was common
from then on: ‘The community of the learned scattered thoughout the
whole world may, even if it is not properly speaking a republic or a society,
nevertheless be called, by virtue of its many similarities to those entities, a
Republic of Letters.’ He continued: ‘The Republic of Letters is extremely
similar, as regards its form, to the invisible Church. Since it possesses here
no monarch, no civil power, but a very great liberty, and just as Holy
Scripture reigns alone, in the same way reason reigns alone in that
Republic, and no one has the right of control over others. And this liberty
is the soul of the Republic of Letters . . .’4 From that point on, the
definitions show little variety; one has only to read the description of the
république littéraire given by Voltaire in 1752: ‘this great society of minds,
extending everywhere and everywhere independent’.5
3 4 5
Bayle 1684, preface (unpaginated). Heumann 1726: 198. Voltaire 2005: 1014.
68 françoise waquet
In many of its constitutive elements, the Republic of Letters stands in
contrast to realities of the time. It claimed to be composed of equal
citizens, as Pierre Bayle wrote in the preface to the first volume of his
Nouvelles de la République des Lettres: ‘All men of learning should see
themselves as brothers, or as coming, each of them, from equally good
homes. They should say: “We are all equal, we are all kin as children of
Apollo.”’ This statement of equality implied by the word ‘republic’ con-
trasts with the keen sense of hierarchy that characterizes the societies of the
Ancien Régime. In the same way, the Republic of Letters claimed to be
open to all religions: ‘Religion in the Republic is not uniform’, stated
Vigneul-Marville in 1700.6 In this regard too, the Republic of Letters
differs from contemporary states in which religious absolutism had been
instituted; the principle cuius regio eius religio held sway almost everywhere,
and tolerance, for those who practiced it, was often adopted only by
default. Religious unity had been destroyed with the Reformation, and
for more than a century violent conflicts engulfed the whole of Europe in
fire and blood: the expression Respublica litteraria et christiana (‘The
Christian Republic of Letters’), common from the end of the sixteenth
century, conveyed within the scholarly world a desire to pass beyond the
boundaries of religious confession.
The Republic of Letters thus reflects a gap between an intellectual ideal
and worldly reality. Even more so, given that men of learning did not
always set a good example themselves: in some cases they gave precedence
to national interests and religious affiliations, and some of them eschewed
complete equality, or even nurtured an ambition to rule. Moreover, the
Republic of Letters remained always only an idea. The attempts made in
the first half of the eighteenth century to establish a societas litteraria
(‘literary society’) of European scale or to establish a ‘Bureau général de
la République des Lettres’ both failed.7 These failures and inherent contra-
dictions reinforced the somewhat utopian nature of the Republic of
Letters. It was, and remained, a grand dream, never realized but always
potentially realizable, which conferred upon the intellectual world a force,
a cohesion and a unity previously unknown.

6
Vigneul-Marville 1700: ii, 60.
7
The Dutch lawyer Hendrik Brenkman launched the project of a societas litteraria in 1712 (and then
again in 1721), for the purposes of providing the learned with the means of publishing and
disseminating their works as well as facilitating the exchange of information by the creation of a
three-monthly bulletin. The project to establish a ‘Bureau général de la République des Lettres’,
which was announced in 1747 in the Bibliothèque des ouvrages savants de l’Europe had a similar aim.
 The Republic of Letters 69

Population
The figurative expression ‘citizens of the Republic of Letters’ which is
found in the texts of the time covers a population who described them-
selves variously as the educated, erudite, learned, or men of letters.8 All of
these terms are related to learning and its most elevated forms. They
indicate, too, a strong awareness of distinction from a world of cultivated
amateurs, of the semi-learned, of the curious, a distinction which became
stronger as that group became more numerous, and with the emergence of
‘popular’ science. At Paris, this is clear from the regulations issued by the
Royal Library in 1720, which specify that, on the one hand, ‘men of
learning of every nation’ could enter the library ‘at any time during the
days and hours which will be specified by the . . . librarian’ and, on the
other, ‘the public . . . drawn there by a desire to educate themselves’ would
be admitted only ‘once a week, from eleven in the morning until one in
the afternoon’.9
The Republic of Letters is principally a world of authors: those who
have published a great deal and often major works. Nevertheless, the
Republic included some people who produced few works, or even none,
but who, by their activity, and by their assistance of the learned, contrib-
uted to the advancement of knowledge: men such as Nicolas de Peiresc
(1580–1637) who, via his letters, the loan of books, manuscripts, antiquities
and curiosities of every kind, worked throughout his life to ‘help the
public’;10 Henry Oldenburg (c. 1615–67) who recruited talented men
scattered throughout the world to contribute to Philosophical Transactions;
or Antonio Magliabechi (1633–1714) who, from Florence, disseminated
literary news which procured for him a European-wide correspondence.
A boundary line long marked the distinction between the learned and
craftsmen – in French, the mécaniques. This word was still employed with
a pejorative sense in Richelet’s Dictionary (1680) where, applied to certain
crafts, it signified ‘low, crude, and unworthy of an honest and liberal
person’. Vigneul-Marville, however, in his definition of the Republic
of Letters, wrote: ‘the mécaniques occupy their own position within it’.
The mécaniques referred to here are men of learning who themselves
functioned from time to time as technicians and makers of machines.

8
The expression ‘men of letters’ should not be taken in the later and specifically literary sense.
9
Arrest du Conseil d’Estat du Roy concernant la Bibliothèque de Sa Majesté du 11 octobre 1720, Paris, s.
d., 4.
10
This expression is found in a letter to Père Morin (quoted by Charles-Daubert 1990: 46–7).
70 françoise waquet
In Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627) statues were erected to those, such
as Gutenberg, who had furthered the advancement of knowledge with
their inventions. More concretely, in the following century the Encyclopé-
die of D’Alembert and Diderot fully rehabilitated the mécaniques and their
expertise, as is evident from the Discours préliminaire: the authors of some
entries, disappointed by the technical works available at the time, visited
the workshops themselves; there they wrote down what the craftsmen told
them, discussed matters with them and then submitted their reports to
them. This is a crucial moment at which the traditional opposition
between science and technology, between a purely speculative form of
knowledge and one which looks towards practical applications, was called
into question. Nevertheless, the ancient prejudices did not disappear
entirely and the Republic of Letters remained throughout the period under
consideration a strongly intellectual society.
This society presented itself as egalitarian, and the very term republic
encouraged a democratic ideal. All the same, some talents were considered
superior, and a hierarchy of talents continued to be recognized. On
this point, we can return to the description given by Heumann, who
distinguished between the primates litterarii, leaders in the world of learn-
ing who were deemed to be of the first rank and who guided the litteratus
grex, or literally, the ‘learned herd’; or, having recourse to a metaphor from
ancient Rome, the senators and the plebs.
Whether or not this Republic was truly egalitarian, its citizens had a
deep sense that they constituted a separate world, that is to say, an elite.
No assessment of the numbers involved was made. The cited figures are
based upon records of academic positions, subscription lists to learned
publications, and university matriculation registers. Even if the members
of these groups outnumber the learned in the strict sense, the numbers
are rather low. The Republic of Letters, senators and plebs both, would
have been in real terms scarcely numerous. This is hardly surprising in an
age when society was largely illiterate, and when a chasm of knowledge
separated the elite from the masses.
This feeling of being an elite can be discerned in the concern shown
with limiting access only to those who could present books they had
written as proof of their learning or, for talented young men, letters of
recommendation: one scholar recommended a new entrant to another one
of his acquaintance, attesting to his qualities, and standing as a guarantor.11
This elitism emerged less from an opposition to the ‘vulgar’ than from
11
Waquet 2010b: 125–53.
 The Republic of Letters 71
a hostility towards all those false talents who claimed entry to the Republic
of Letters on the basis of borrowed learning, or knowledge without
real substance.
Moralizing writing attacked pedants and charlatans and, more broadly,
all bad behavior in the intellectual sphere. It was particularly abundant in
the German world and, by way of a few representative examples, one could
mention the De machiavellismo litterario of Michael Lilienthal (1713) and
the De charlataneria eruditorum of Johannes Burkhard Mencke (1715).
These normative works castigating all the evils associated with power and
ambition also produced a positive image strongly inspired by the historia
litteraria of the Baconian approach: the learned man who rises above all
particular interests in order to contribute to a collective project as an
ongoing endeavor. We find the same inspiration in biographical writing,
the principles of which were summarized by Michael Lilienthal: writing
the life of a learned man was no longer simply a matter of praising him, as
it had been during the Renaissance, but became instead an attempt to
reconstruct an individual destiny in terms of its contribution to a collective
project – the advancement of learning.12
This model of the learned man, which took shape between the sixteenth
and eighteenth centuries, included a moral element, or even a religious
one. Such an ideal was realized in different ways at different moments in
time, after Erasmus came to represent a ‘scholar-saint’.13 The religious
dimension received a fresh impetus with Robert Boyle’s The Christian
Virtuoso (1690), the subtitle of which expresses the idea particularly well:
Shewing that by Being Addicted to Experimental Philosophy, a Man is Rather
Assisted than Indisposed to be a Good Christian. Learning was not an agent
of impiety and atheism: it served rather the perfection of the soul. This
ideal of Christian knowledge was widely shared in the Republic of Letters,
and it was only in the course of the eighteenth century that a model of
the secular intellectual, of which Condorcet would be the prototype in the
Republic of Sciences, began to emerge.
Moralizing literature also insisted upon the social qualities which the
learned man should possess, and the civility which should rule in the
Republic of Letters. Moreover, agreeable manners promoted the commu-
nication of knowledge. Daniel Georg Morhof made this argument in his
Polyhistor (vol. i, 1688) where, in the chapter on intellectual conversation
(I. 14) he stressed the extent to which good manners encouraged the
exchange of knowledge and how much rudeness, brusqueness and a
12 13
Waquet 2010a: 169–81. Jardine 1993.
72 françoise waquet
morose manner worked against it. Some learned men mark themselves
out, it is true, by rather unsociable behavior, rough manners, and a gruff
bearing. ‘The civilization of good manners’ had, however, its perfect
representatives in the Republic of Letters: the Venetian Antonio Conti,
who stayed in Paris at the beginning of the eighteenth century, discovered
from his experience of learned society in the capital that ‘a scholar can be a
man of the world’.14
As all the names so far given indicate, the Republic of Letters is a
masculine realm. Women had not yet gained admission to colleges and
universities, and the education that they received prepared them for
domestic tasks or, in the upper classes, for a fashionable social life. For
these women there was no question of Greek and Latin. Nevertheless,
there were some women who marked themselves out by their genuine and
profound learning. They should not be confused with the female pedants
and précieuses (something like ‘affected ladies’) mocked by Molière. But
learned female authors, such as Madame Dacier (1647–1720) who pro-
duced several editions ad usum Delphini, were nevertheless exceptional
cases. Moreover, in the seventeenth century and still more so in the
eighteenth, when the advancement of knowledge was no longer conducted
entirely in Latin, a female public who were highly cultivated and who
participated in intellectual activity began to emerge, in imitation of the
salonnières who held sway over cultivated society in Paris.
This largely masculine world of the Republic of Letters was socially
heterogeneous in terms of the wealth, backgrounds and positions of its
members. We can stress here one particularly striking feature: certain
families took root in the Republic, maintaining a position at the summit
of learning over several generations, such as the Cassini who dominated the
field of astronomy for more than a century. Some fathers saw their sons
follow in their footsteps, such as the three great philologists of the Golden
Age in Holland, Vossius, Heinsius and Gronovius. There are several
examples of scholarly brothers, such as the Dupuys who, in Paris in the
1620s and subsequent years, gathered around themselves one of the most
well-known intellectual circles of the Republic of Letters. Future scholar-
ship should explore the alliances between learned families. Kinship net-
works, or dynasties, made up an additional structural element in the
Republic of Letters. A further link arose also from the affiliations that
linked a master and his disciples, producing intellectual genealogies,
another type of network at the heart of the world of learning.
14
Conti 1756: ii, 22.
 The Republic of Letters 73

Geography
The Republic of Letters was keen to define itself as universal: ‘no republic
is larger [. . .] it extends over the entire earth’, remarked Vigneul-Marville
in the text cited above. This claim of wide extent, equivalent even to
the dimensions of the world itself, underlines the utopian character of the
Republic: it stood in sharp contrast to the political map of nation states
that were at that time more and more strongly divided. Universalism of
this sort encouraged a powerful cosmopolitanism among the learned,
rooted in a fraternity of learning. Isaac Casaubon explained this when he
wrote in 1595: ‘The community of those who study the same topics links
minds and conciliates and unites men who do not know one another
and who live in far removed parts of the world.’15 This kind of belief was
reinforced by the very real practices of communication and exchange
(discussed below) – practices that wove together the manifold and close
connections between the citizens of this ideal republic.
The unity in knowledge was undermined, it is true, by national alle-
giances. Thus Thomas Sprat, the first historian of the Royal Society,
stressed the natural advantages of England as a ‘land of experimental
knowledge’, specifying that nature itself favored the English by revealing
her secrets to them above all.16 Similar declarations are found throughout
the period and throughout Europe, reinforced as they were by a desire
to serve also, and sometimes principally, the glory of a prince or a state.17
For all that, they did not at all prevent the persistence of a universal and
shared ideal; although frequently belied by the facts, that ideal was pro-
claimed ceaselessly and retained its full power between the sixteenth and
eighteenth centuries: it would be a mistake to see in such statements
nothing more than an empty rhetoric without real significance.
While the Republic of Letters set forth a universal ideal, its geographical
extent appeared, in reality, rather more limited. It was confined to Europe.
This was the general opinion, as is clear from the address to the reader in
the first number of the Journal des savants (1665): ‘Since the aim of this
journal is to offer information about fresh developments in the Republic of
Letters, it will consist primarily of a precise catalogue of the chief books of
Europe.’ Even so, this Europe was confined to the western part of the

15
Casaubon 1709: i, 23.
16
Sprat 1667: 113–15. Sprat relies upon, among others, the theory of climates (see below).
17
An example in France is that of the Academy of Sciences, which was as focused upon the glory of the
monarch as it was upon the advancement of learning – a dual allegiance which was not always
without contradiction: see Stroup 1990.
74 françoise waquet
continent. Thus Russia remained at least until the reign of Peter the Great
a virgin zone; in 1711, Leibniz remarked, in a note to the tsar: ‘there is, so to
speak, a tabula rasa in Russia in the matter of scholarship’.18
Even in this limited space confined to the western part of Europe, the
geographical spread of the Republic of Letters was scarcely homogenous;
some areas of dense activity (such as France, England and Holland) lay
alongside regions that were sparsely occupied or even deserted. One has
only to think of the lack of enthusiasm of Descartes upon his departure
for Sweden (1649), ‘to go to live in the land of bears and ice’.19 Moreover,
the densely inhabited zones were not at all uniform: in England as well as
in France, we find a strong opposition between center and periphery: for
instance, in France, between the capital and the provinces.
Moreover, between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, some
changes affected the shape and the balance of the intellectual world. For
various reasons, certain regions which had once been intellectually fertile
gave way to others. Among the most marked examples of this kind, we can
note: the emergence towards the end of the sixteenth century of the
United Provinces which became, due to the dynamism of their printing
presses, the ‘world’s shop’;20 the decline of the German-speaking world
during the Thirty Years’ War and the consecutive shift towards the East –
towards Vienna, Saxony and Brandenburg; the decline of the South in
favour of the North which, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
came at the expense of Italy. In the course of the period, we can also
observe an increasing density of the intellectual world as marked by the
multiplication of academies throughout Europe, with a clear increase in
foundations in the second half of the eighteenth century. In the course of
this same century, a new phenomenon arose: ‘the emergence of American
scholarship’21 and, with it, the entry of America into the Republic of
Letters. At times, the changes noted by historians were exaggerated by
those who experienced them: thus, in the 1670s and the years that followed
Italian men of learning overstated their marginalization in the new intel-
lectual order: they saw themselves as relegated to ‘a corner of the earth’, in
a ‘solitude’ as far removed from civilization as ‘the most remote parts of the
New World’.22
If certain political, religious and cultural realities (without forgetting
wars) account for the geographical distribution of learning, a theory
considered scientific at the time served as both explanation and

18 19 20
Leibniz 1969: 490. Baillet 1691: ii.370. Berkvens-Stevelinck et al. 1991.
21 22
Stearns 1970. Waquet 1989: 358–69.
 The Republic of Letters 75
confirmation of the trend: namely, the theory of climates.23 This theory,
which was based upon certain specific physiological ideas, established a
causal connection between the character and particular gifts of the inhabit-
ants of a given place and the latitude of the region and the air they
breathed. Although geographical determinism of this sort was not always
accepted, and although historical variations raised doubts, nevertheless the
theory of climates retained considerable popularity up to and including
the eighteenth century. In a more or less explicit fashion, it underlies the
judgments about the particular capabilities of the inhabitants of Europe to
contribute equally to the advancement of knowledge. Thus Pierre-Daniel
Huet, at the time of his voyage to Sweden (1652–3), showed little surprise
at ‘the superstition and the credulity’ of a native of that country: ‘it is a
rather common failing’, he remarked in his account, ‘of people who, being
born beneath a cold sky, and feeling the benign influence of the sun less
than we do, are slower in the operations of the spirit and less capable of
distinguishing truth from error’.24

Communication: Varied Practice, One Language

The Republic of Letters is an intellectual community; its purpose lies in the
communication of learning and it furthers that communication at every
opportunity. The terms communicate and communication are used frequently,
and the adjective communicative is one of the finest compliments for a
learned person. Communication is an ideal based on a fraternal solidarity
in the pursuit of knowledge, uniting scholars above personal, political and
religious divisions. For that reason, the good citizen of the Republic of
Letters had to demonstrate his good will, generosity, obliging nature, agree-
able manners, compliancy and consideration: qualities which center upon
the fundamental notion of humanitas. This ideal, which had been set forth
clearly in the age of Humanism, received a fresh impetus with the develop-
ment of Baconian science, which entailed the collaboration of talents.25
The establishment, maintenance and encouragement of communication
was not merely an ideal; it was also a necessity. In the intellectual world of
the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, resources were scattered and often
difficult to access, and tools for accessing them, such as catalogues or
bibliographies, were rare or non-existent. As the printing presses produced
an ever-increasing mass of books, how could one find out what had been
published in any given place? The learned still wished to be informed of all
23 24 25
Pinna 1988. Huet 1853: 61. Dibon 1990; Bots and Waquet 1994.
76 françoise waquet
the kinds of activity that were taking place in the intellectual realm: not
only imminent publications or projects in progress, but also news about
individuals and institutions – not to mention the gossip that circulated
within the intellectual sphere.
From the second half of the seventeenth century, scholars were able to
rely on journals, and these were widely read. The Journal des savants, the
first to be published, in 1665, was followed by many others in England,
Italy, the United Provinces and the German-speaking world. The success
of these many publications should not however be overstated, at least
during their first decades: many journals had a difficult and often brief
life, with irregular publication, or even interruptions. Moreover, they
gave only a selective survey of information, especially for foreign publi-
cations, reviews of which appeared after long delays. Finally, these
journals were often considered to be intended not so much for ‘the
learned’ and ‘professional scholars’, as for ‘men of the world’, in other
words a cultivated public, as Bayle remarked in the advertisement for
the second volume of his Nouvelles de la République des Lettres. In fact,
then as now, men of learning wanted a source of up-to-date information
that was swift, pertinent, responsive to their needs and requirements,
and offered more specific information such as the location of a manu-
script or remarks on a book, an experience, or a person.26 They therefore
continued to seek information in the traditional forms: by correspond-
ence and oral communication.
Letters could communicate more news, adapt that news to the recipient
and, more importantly, convey information more quickly. If, in the
middle years of the seventeenth century, a letter sent by post took seven
to ten days to reach Paris from La Haye, that is to travel less than
500 kilometres, this ‘slowness’ was insignificant by comparison with that
of journals which travelled at the speed of a parcel and, in addition, had to
take account of all the delays involved in collecting and processing of
information, and finally of publication.
Networks of correspondence developed that breached political and
religious boundaries, often gathering a large number of correspondents
around a single person. Since the conveyance of letters was costly, only
those learned men who had postage facilities at their disposal and financial
resources of their own or were able to benefit from the resources put at
their disposal by a prince could establish and maintain very large networks
of correspondence – such as Leibniz, for example, who put his service to
26
Peiffer and Vittu 2008; Waquet 2010a: 155–68 (‘Périodiques/Correspondances’).
 The Republic of Letters 77
the Duke of Brunswick to good use. Some men of learning, by virtue of
their position or their wealth, took on the role of important intermediaries,
passing on information which they had received:27 an example of this is
Magliabechi, the librarian of the Grand Duke of Tuscany from 1673 to
1714, whose letters amount to true bibliographical bulletins responding to
the particular interests of his numerous correspondents. Epistolary com-
munication in the Republic of Letters went far beyond the binary rela-
tionship of sender and recipient. Letters were read in intellectual circles
and academies, and the conversations which ensued fostered further
letters in return.
These conversations emphasize one aspect of the oral dimension of
intellectual exchange during this period, which could be formal as in these
meetings, or informal as in the encounters which arose naturally in a
library or bookshop. These were means of being informed, by personal
discussion, about every matter in which the Republic of Letters was
involved. We’ll give just one example. ‘Yesterday,’ wrote Budé to Erasmus
on 5 February 1517, ‘I was struck by a sudden whim . . . to spend several
hours, during the afternoon, in the bookshops. At Jehan Petit’s, a well
known bookseller, I met Guillaume Petit who is, I think, a relative of his.’
Having recalled that Guillaume Petit was his ‘close friend’ and that
he fulfilled the lofty function of confessor to the king, he continued:
‘he informed me that the day before yesterday, I believe, a discussion
had taken place in the presence of the king on the subject of the men of
letters’, in the course of which the king had mentioned Erasmus and stated
his intention of founding ‘a sort of seminary for men of learning’. Some
further details were given accompanied by the comment: ‘[I] simply repeat
conscientiously what I heard.’28 In fact, all these resources – oral, written
and printed – were drawn upon to transmit ‘literary news’, as learned
information was then called.
Communication in the Republic of Letters was founded upon reci-
procity, and the system depended upon what each individual could offer –
certain people being of course in a stronger position than others. Multiple
obstacles had to be negotiated: distance, political and religious conflicts,
but also quarrels and polemics which, from time to time, divided the
intellectual world into rival factions. But communication was furthered by
the friendships which linked small communities closely together, and

27
Berkvens-Stevelinck, Bots and Hässler 2005.
28
Translation based upon that of Garanderie 1967: 97–8. On orality in the intellectual world of the
period, see Waquet 2003.
78 françoise waquet
which established some learned men as particularly important respondents,
even in the process of checking work before it was published.29
For a long period, Latin was the language used for the communication
of knowledge in the Republic of Letters.30 As late as 1765, it was still
described in that most modern of works, the Encyclopédie, as ‘the common
language of all the learned men of Europe’, and judged ‘absolutely essential
[. . .] for philosophy and theology as much as for law and medicine’.31 In
the seventeenth century and still in the first half of the eighteenth century,
the proportion of Latin publications in these fields remains notable even if
it declines as time goes by. Thirty-one percent of works analyzed in the
Bibliothèque raisonnée des ouvrages des savants de l’Europe between 1728 and
1740 are in Latin. Several major works of science were still written in the
Latin in the eighteenth century, such as the Ars conjectandi of Jacob
Bernoulli I, the Mechanica (1736) and the Introductio in analysin infini-
torum (1748) of Leonhard Euler, the Systema naturae (1735) of Linnaeus,
and the De viribus electricitatis in motu musculari (1791) of Galvani.
Learned periodicals also appeared in Latin: some 20 percent of them in
the period 1665–1747; in the second half of the eighteenth century, we find
fourteen new journal titles published in Latin between 1751 and 1760, and
a further thirteen between 1771 and 1780 in the German-speaking world
alone. Moreover, works originally published in the vernacular were trans-
lated into Latin. These translations, which were numerous in the seven-
teenth century and the first half of the following century, feature
prominently in every type of learned publication, beginning with the
periodicals and their two most important titles, the Journal des savants
and Philosophical Transactions.32 In the first half of the eighteenth century
works of archaeology, zoology, botany and anatomy were published in a
bilingual format, setting a Latin text alongside a vernacular one. All this
gives the lie to the cursory belief that tends to associate modern forms of
knowledge with the vernacular languages. Among the titles cited above,
the work of Linnaeus reminds us that botany was established as a modern
science in Latin.
Thus Latin remained the common language of the learned until a late
date. Learned men wrote largely in Latin throughout the period considered
here, and they did so, one might say, quite naturally. On the one hand,
they had been educated in Latin: teaching in the universities was

29
Darmon and Waquet 2010.
30
On the role of Latin in the intellectual world, see Waquet 2001, chapters 3, 5.1, 6 and 10.2.
31 32
Diderot and d’Alembert 1765: 265. Burke 2007a.
 The Republic of Letters 79
conducted in Latin until the end of the eighteenth century, with the
exception of new or technical subjects. On the other hand, the bulk of
their reading consisted of works in Latin. Finally, the influence of major
works published in Latin played a role: the new concepts conveyed in these
works could not always be easily translated, but were perfectly intelligible
for the learned men who needed to employ them. That is not to say that
writing in Latin has always been easy; some of the learned lamented – and
increasingly so as time went on – the puzzling use of a dead language. All
the same, this did not prevent them from using Latin, and – in certain
cases – from demonstrating a fine facility in it, as is evident in occasional
writings of the period, such as the poems dedicated to an author which
were printed in the prefatory material to his work.33
The Latin employed in the Republic of Letters was not of an entirely
Ciceronian purity. It was influenced by the national languages both in its
written and oral forms. In the second half of the seventeenth century,
Ménage commented on this in a lucid manner; with some few exceptions,
authors were ‘full of gallicisms, teutonisms, anglicisms and idioms from all
the rest of Europe’.34 Moreover, university writing developed a Latin
jargon consisting of fashionable words, which, if they existed at all in
antiquity, were used rarely or with a different meaning.35 The language of
instruction was no better: Casaubon described as ‘barbaric’ the Latin that
he heard at the Sorbonne.36 Understanding was often hindered by a lack of
uniformity in pronunciation, which was colored by national or local
accents; pronunciation was also affected by fashions and mannerisms: in
the Low Countries, people imitated the pronunciation of Justus Lipsius by
saying zed (for sed).37
Phenomena of this sort, which tended to weaken the force of Latin,
were largely counterbalanced by certain incomparable strengths. On the
one hand, all the vernacular languages were not considered suitable for
expounding learning: German acquired the status of a literary language
only late, in the eighteenth century, and Swedish was not considered a
language of culture at any point during the period considered here. On the
other hand, the rise of the vernacular languages worked to the benefit
of Latin. The linguistic fragmentation that resulted reinforced the role
of Latin as a shared language of communication at a time when the

33
Van Dam 2009: 118–22 (on poems written for publication in prefatory material).
34
Ménage 1729: i, 308.
35
Helander 2004: 94–7, 99, 111, 117–18, 121–2, 127, 132, 142–3, 158–9, 162–3, 166–7, 170, 171, 172.
36 37
Ménage 1729: iii, 33–4. Scaliger 1740: ii, 380.
80 françoise waquet
knowledge of foreign languages was limited. Latin translations of works
published initially in the vernacular were often explicitly justified by a
concern for a greater diffusion to learned men of other countries. The
problem that had already been perceived in the seventeenth century only
grew more pressing. D’Alembert, who, in the Discours préliminaire de
l’Encyclopédie, approved the practice of writing in one’s own language,
noted the disadvantages which followed: the learning of ‘seven or eight
different languages’ and, along with that, the loss of precious time for true
scholarship. Hence his wish that Latin should once more become, for
works of philosophy, the ‘universal conventional language’. Though he
added, pessimistically: ‘it’s pointless to hope for that’.38

F U R T H E R RE A D IN G
In addition to the references in footnotes, important discussions of the topic can
be found in Fumaroli 2005, Goldgar 1995, Shapin 1994 and Shelford 2007.

38
d’Alembert 1984: 113–14.
 chapter 5

Epigram
Robert Cummings

‘They come in as many verse forms as there are verse forms; they are
composed in as many languages or kinds of language, with as much variety
of appearance, form, shape, address, as there is variety of appearance, form,
shape, address, in whatsoever language or nation or people or race’, says
Julius Caesar Scaliger in his hugely influential account of epigram.1 The
epigram is tied to the world of things and people, places and events. It is
uncontainable by generalization. Epigrams are as random as the world is.
‘My book is a world’ says John Owen (Ep. 1.3: Hic liber est mundus),2 while
Lessing defies anyone to read him without growing dizzy.3 But the literary
epigram never quite loses touch with some wider understanding of
‘inscription’, as a text physically written on something (a monument, a
wall, a map, a work of art), and acquiring force from its placement. At the
same time, as this chapter is at pains to insist, it is a condition of the
development of the literary epigram that the something on which it is
written might no longer be physically there: and satirical or amatory
epigrams, addressed to objects of contempt or desire, can rarely have been
literally inscriptional.4

Emblems and Epitaphs

Two kinds of epigram retain a close association with inscription: icones
(or ‘emblems’), and epitaphs. For the first kind the epigrams on artworks
in Book 4 of the Planudean Anthology (Book 16 in the Palatine and modern

Robert Cummings, very sadly, died before publication. At his death, his chapter was complete, but he
had been unable to respond to final comments from readers. The editor has accordingly made some
final revisions and minor additions for clarity.
1
Scaliger 1994–2003: iii, 206 (Lib. 3, cap.1 25). The numbering in Scaliger 1561 is 3.126.
2 3
All references are to Owen 1999. Lessing 1825: 176.
4
Though Giacomo Mazzocchi collected both ancient Roman inscriptions and modern Roman
satirical pasquilli.

83
84 robert cummings
editions of the Greek Anthology), are the chief precedent. Rarely descrip-
tive, such epigrams mark their distance from their declared subject by
intimating something extraordinary unexpectedly related to it, clearest in
the mode launched by Alciato’s much-reprinted Emblemata (first in 1531).
Alciato explained his ‘emblems’ in terms of a collaborative pairing of
epigram and pictorial ‘invention’, the latter supplying what Martial calls
a lemma, the topic set for composition (11.42).5 Most of Alciato’s inven-
tions are at second or third hand from any real art-work, and many are
borrowed from the Greek Anthology; but the images that characterize
printed emblem books generally represent art-works that might appropri-
ately support inscriptions. Johannes Sambucus’ Emblemata (1564) derive
from more exactly archaeological preoccupations than Alciato professed;
Sambucus acknowledges his debt to the reverses of coins and engraved
jewels as well as to literary descriptions.6 Scriptural texts supply the
lemmata for the Jesuit Herman Hugo’s (1588–1629) Pia Desideria (1624)
but it is the pictorial inventions resulting from collaboration with his
engraver that stimulate the epigrams: Mario Praz notes that the plates
were sometimes published with blank pages for readers to record their own
meditations, which is in effect what Francis Quarles does in his English
and Protestant versions from Hugo.7 The Icones in Bèze’s Juvenilia (1548)
offer meditations on exemplary moments from history or quasi-history:
Cato dying, Brutus dying, Lucretia dying, Dido dying; one, on Jupiter
confronted by Phidias’ statue of him, plays with the conventions of more
formal ecphrasis.8 Buchanan’s Icones, grouped together in Book 2 of his
epigrams, juxtapose celebrations of semi-mythologized historical figures
with the frankly mythical, some of these designed originally for the walls of
the headquarters of the Marshal Brissac in Turin.9 The historical include
the humanist Valla, whose slaughter of solecisms makes him – according to
Buchanan – a great monster-killer; the mythical include Helen, whose face
launched a thousand ships and who would have been happier had she been
less lovely.10
Book 3 of the Planudean Anthology (Book 7 in modern editions of the
Greek Anthology) is taken up with epitaphs, still the most readily identifi-
able inscriptional epigrams and which, like ‘icons’, are frequently segre-
gated in collections of epigrams. Death is a rich topic for poetry, and the
preface to Canonieri’s 1613 anthology, Flores illustrium epitaphiorum, for

5 6 7
See Cummings 2007. Sambucus 1564:6. Praz 1964: 143 n. 2; Quarles 1635.
8 9
Bèze 2001: 180–207, icons 13, 12, 11, 2, 16. McFarlane 1981: 177.
10
Buchanan 1725: ii, 430; ii, 429.
 Epigram 85
instance, announces that the collection is made with an eye on poetic
quality at least as much as historical interest.11 Indeed, the first printed
modern epigrams were in a funerary collection for Alessandro Cinuzzi, a
page in the household of Girolamo Riario.12 In proposing the poet Wyatt
as a more proper subject for poetical grief than Lesbia’s sparrow John
Leland situates himself as a rival to Catullus.13 Already, when a sepulchre
for Dante was proposed, Boccaccio tells us that every one among the poets
of the Romagna competed per mostrare la sua sofficienzia (‘to show what
they could do’) by contributing verses for it.14 The Seymour sisters’
Hecatodistichon for Marguerite of Navarre, more especially in its second
edition (1551), is overwhelmed by complimentary paratexts: the focus turns
from the dead heroine of French letters to the precocious achievement of
the new heroines of Anglo-Latin letters.15
Commemorative volumes, commonly university collections, are con-
sistently occasions for display of this kind. Thomas Wilson’s own major
contribution to the funerary volume for his promising young Cambridge
pupils the brothers Henry and Charles Brandon comes in an appendix
given over to other unrelated famous men and women.16 The Cambridge
collection for Martin Bucer prepared by John Cheke earlier in the same
year, pietatis ac litterarum nomine (‘in his memory, and for the advance-
ment of good literature’), is headed by epigrams by the Brandon brothers,
testimonies of their precocious literary excellence.17 The first of the three
university collections for Sir Philip Sidney, from Cambridge, opened with
an English sonnet by King James of Scotland and a sequence of competing
Latin translations by himself and members of his court.18
Puttenham complains of the ignorant confusion of epitaph and the
fashion for ‘long and tedious discourses’ hung up in churches over the
tombs of great men, too long to be read while passing by.19 Printed
collections, unconstrained by limitations of space or by the preferences
of readers in a hurry may contain long elegies and full-blown pastorals.
John Lloyd’s New College Peplus for Sidney invokes a comparison with the
so-called Peplus of Aristotle, a sequence of epitaphs for the Homeric
heroes, some already translated by Ausonius as the Epitaphia Heroum.20
Lloyd evidently had no qualms about compromising the reality of grief for

11
Canonieri 1613: *4r. 12
Cinuzzi 1474. 13
Leland 2007: (‘Communis dolor’).
14 15 16
The story is cited in Burckhardt 1990: 174. Seymour 2000. Wilson 1551.
17
Cheke 1550: b2r; i2r v. 18
Neville 1587: k1r-k2v. 19
Puttenham 2007: 144; 1.28.
20
Lloyd 1587: A2v. The Greek is edited by Willem Canter with his own translations as Aristotelis
Stagiritae Pepli fragmentum (Basle, 1566). Stephanus introduces them (497–502) into his edition of
the Anthology (Geneva, 1566).
86 robert cummings
Sidney. The two books of Pontano’s Tumuli mix real epitaphs from the
Capella Pontano in Naples, such as the poem on his daughter Lucia
(De Tumulis 2.2) or those on his son Lucio Francesco (2.26, 27) with
epitaphs imaginary or only very improbably genuine: at their best playing
precisely with the want of a designating inscription, as those on children
dead too early to be given a name (2.43, 54).21 Sannazaro’s epigrams
include an epitaph on Hannibal (Ep. 1.27) constructed only for the sake
of a pun.
Objecting to the prevalent affectation of paganism in epitaphs, Dr
Johnson applauds ‘the Pope who defaced the statues of the deities at the
tomb of Sannazarius’ – apparently by relabelling Apollo and Minerva as
David and Judith.22 An epitaph on Sannazaro attributed to Bembo asks its
readers why they wait to die: ‘the shade of immortal Virgil watches you and
grants you a place next to him’ (aeterni te suscipit umbra Maronis | et tibi
vivinum donat habere locum).23 In a frankly pagan celebration of Sidney,
Campion asks for news to be carried to Venus that she may mourn the poet
of her Loves: renunciate | Funestum Veneri exitum Philippi, | Vatem defleat ut
suorum Amorum (Ep. 2.11). Even Buchanan, in lines that Bradner singles
out for their ‘classical flavor and polished compactness’, hopes that Andre
de Gouvea’s endeavours on behalf of the muses will be rewarded and no
brighter shade inhabit the groves of Elysium.24 Even when they avoid
paganism, literary epitaphs entertain other distractions: Campion’s iambics
on the death of Essex’s brother (Ep. 2.9) is concerned chiefly with the
malign effects of gunpowder.25 It is the distraction from the obvious that
makes the point. George Herbert’s sequence on his mother includes one
epitaphium stranded among complicated private articulations of grief, and
here even Herbert is distracted by chilly antitheses: Sic excelsa humilisque
simul loca dissita junxit, | Quicquid habet tellus, quicquid et astra, fruens
(‘Thus at once lowly and exalted, she brought together regions remote,
enjoying whatever earth offers or whatever heaven’).26

Antithesis and Wit

This focus upon antithesis is conventionally what makes an epigram, at
least the kind of epigram that Scaliger values: the Latin epigram as written
by Martial. The epigram, in this tradition, plays with unlikely

21 22 23
Pontano 1977: i, 240–73. Johnson 2000: 99. Bembo 2005: 189 (Appendix B: 6).
24 25
Buchanan 1725: ii, 381; Bradner 1940: 138. Vivian 1909: 272.
26
Hutchinson 1972: 429 (Memoriae matris sacrum 13).
 Epigram 87
conjunctions, the ‘yoking together of heterogeneous ideas’, typically played
across the ready-made doubleness of the elegiac couplet. When the epi-
gram leaves its place beneath the statue or painting, or upon the tombstone
that it identifies and arrives on the page without a context, then a compen-
satory complication becomes more or less obligatory. ‘There is a class of
epigrams’, says Scaliger ‘which are composite, and which infer from the
stated theme something else.’27 It is the movement to something else,
beyond mere identification, that offers the surprise typical of epigram and
that allows Scaliger to argue that while brevity is characteristic of the
epigram, what he calls argutia (‘wit’, ‘point’) is its soul or essence.28 The
movement is rather like that of the joke, which is one reason why satirical
epigrams are often regarded as typical, and why Scaliger, who though he
has no great interest in epigrams with a satirical bias, proposes the meta-
phors of gall, vinegar and salt – all tastes that might ambush the tongue.29
The word argutia is usually translated as ‘point’ either because it designates
sharpness or, more likely, because it designates what is reckoned to bring
an argument to a conclusion. Scaliger writes of the ideal epigram that it is
sibi instans (‘pressing on itself’), as if the energy it generated were held to a
recognizable if not quite anticipatable end.30
When the younger Pliny (Epistolae 7.9.9) describes epigram as acutum et
breve (‘short and sharp’) he means only that for cultivated gentlemen it
represents a suitable diversion from real business. The Jesuit Jacob Masen
invokes Pliny as an authority for the necessary arguta brevitas of the
epigram, but he offers the bluntly unrelaxed figure of oxymoron as its
type.31 Scaliger’s notion of witty inference from a stated theme is more
delicate: he means in effect a comparison of one thing with another; and
he specifies that the comparison should be ‘greater or lesser, or similar or
different, or quite opposite’ (aut maius aut minus aut aequale aut diversum
aut contrarium).32 The terms are slippery, but they are derived from
Aristotle (Rhetoric 3.10.7) and accordingly submit to academic elaboration
in succeeding specialist volumes on the epigram. These begin with an essay
by the professor of rhetoric Tommaso Corréa (1569), who makes the

27
Scaliger 1994–2003: iii, 204 (Lib. 3, cap. 126).
28
The singular argutia seems to be a neologism; by argutiae are understood instances of brilliance, and
they seem to be associated with acumen: Cicero credits the orator Hyperides with argutiae and
acumen (Orator 31, 110).
29
Scaliger 1994–2003: iii, 212 (Lib. 3, cap. 125 Appendix).
30
Scaliger 1994–2003: iii, 204 (Lib. 3, cap. 125).
31
At least in the later editions: see Masen 1711: 12. In the 1649 edition he does not mention Pliny.
32
Scaliger 1994–2003: iii, 204 (Lib. 3, cap. 125).
88 robert cummings
epigram the vehicle of self-conscious stylishness. A number of the succeed-
ing accounts, however, are clearly designed for school use, and they are
often by Jesuits.33 Their bias is to the pointed epigram, partly because it is a
distinctively Latin form in a culture that was more Latin than Greek. The
elaboration is at its most baroque in Emanuele Tesauro’s Aristotelian
Cannocchiale or ‘perspective glass’, which devotes almost twenty pages
(551–68) to explicating the witty possibilities of the conjunction of bees
and amber (as exhibited in Martial 4.32).34
The Jesuit schoolmaster Nicolas Mercier supplies a whole anthology
classified by such means of securing ‘point’.35 Sannazaro’s ‘golden’ epigram
(Ep. 1.35) plays the lesser and earthly Rome against the greater Venice,
built by gods; John Owen compares like with like, man and earth, both
swollen with pride (Ep. 6.74), Jakob Bidermann (Ep. 3.94) marks the
unlikeness of Baldwin I’s war against Islam and the failure of modern
divided Germany to follow his example; Casimir Sarbiewski (Ep. 63) finds
likeness in a wax portrait of Nero along with unlikeness to the iron
character of the reality. Such awkward comparisons may be sharpened
into verbal paradox: Bèze’s argument (Ep. 61) that François I is truly a
victor because in refusing war he conquered himself is contrived ‘from
a paradox’, says Mercier (238); Owen’s naked Love (Ep. 2.88) that freezes
least when most undressed is (because there is a play on the literal and
metaphorical senses of algeo) constructed from ‘a paradox and the ambi-
guity of a word’ (353); and his argument that poverty is preferable to riches
(3.54) because the poor have hope and the rich have only fear is made
‘from a paradox and by means of antithesis’. Mercier reserves a section of
his examples for the sacred epigram: the Magdalen of Pierre Alois (Ep. 4.7)
supplies a more miraculous paradox than de Bèze’s Cato, for when she
weeps on Christ’s feet it is as if the course of things were reversed and the
earth rained on heaven (376).

Virtuoso Variation and Display

The selections from the Greek Anthology by Joannes Soter (1525) and
Joannes Cornarius (1529) were introductions to Greek epigram (with a
bias to the sort of Greek epigram that might be best suited to Latin taste);
but they were also treated as storehouses of competing versions of Greek

33 34
Hutton 1935: 65–72 describes a selection of these. Tesauro 2000: 551–68.
35
The examples that follow are all from Mercier 1653.
 Epigram 89
models.36 Already in the 1560s at Winchester Charles Johnson is promot-
ing epigram above other forms, with Martial as a model.37 For the Jesuits
there was no better way in which to experiment with many possible
variations on a single theme (phrasim eandem modis pluribus variare).38
Stephanus’ Epigrammata Graeca (1570), also an introduction to Greek
verse, made for the delight of ‘young people with an appetite for poetry’
(iuvenes poetices studiosos) comes equipped with glosses in prose; but it
also includes 104 versions of the final couplet of an epigram by Agathias
(Greek Anthology 6.76).39 The Kentish schoolmaster John Stockwood,
whose Progymnasmata scholasticum (1597) reworks Stephanus’ selection,
supplies a grammatical analysis as well as a literal translation. Like
Stephanus, Stockwood includes variant Latin translations of the Greek,
but ‘provoked by his example’, he supplies 450 Latin versions of a couplet
by Macedonius the Consul (Greek Anthology 5. 224).40
The taste for virtuoso exhibition took a less likely turn. Jean Crespin’s
inclusion of figure poems – that is, epigrams in the shape of their subject,
such as wings, an axe or a pipe – in his much-reprinted anthology of early
Greek poetry launched a vogue for the highly contrived structuring of
poems, whether visually or verbally.41 Tricks of this sort – including very
popular motifs such as acrostics, anagrams, chronograms, palindromic
poems and so on – are treated briefly by Scaliger and most of the specialist
writers on epigram; they are discussed extensively by Alsted who lists some
sixty techniques.42 A talent for wordplay of this kind could evidently
secure a reputation: Richard Willes, an Old Wykehamist and lapsed
Jesuit, returned from Perugia to Protestant England to dedicate his efforts
to William Cecil as testimony of his merits.43 But Ben Jonson would
happily burn all logogriphs, palindromes, anagrams, eteostichs, or ‘those finer
flams’ of pattern poems, ‘acrostics, and telestichs’ (Underwood 43.34–9).
Other forms of wordplay are less spectacular. Owen writes that
the anagrammatic relationship between the Latin words ivs and vis

36
Soter 1525 reprinted 1528, 1544. An account of Epigrammata graeca . . . collecta, ed. Joannes Soter
(Cologne, 1525, 1528 and Freiburg, 1544) and the Selecta epigrammata graeca, ed. Joannes Cornarius
(Basel, 1529) is given in Hutton 1935: 273–86.
37
Baldwin 1944: i, 323; and see Hudson 1947: 150–4.
38
Domenichi 1606: 115. The final version of the Ratio studiorum was first published in 1599.
39
Stephanus 1570: }2v: 284–96. 40
Stockwood 1597: 413–39.
41
Crespin 1569 includes Simias’ ‘Axe’, ‘Wings’ and ‘Egg’, and Theocritus’ ‘Pipe’.
42
Scaliger 1994–2003: i, 554–60, 584–92 (Lib. 2, caps. 25, 30); Alsted 1630: ii, 549–67; 10.4.5. Higgins
1987 gives the fullest modern account. Binns 1990: 46–59 discusses the fashion for these devices in
Anglo-Latin verse.
43
Willes 1573; and cp. Montaigne 2003: 348; 1.54 and Hobbes in Spingarn 1908: ii, 57.
90 robert cummings
properly reflects the adverse relation of law and force (Ep. 2.133).
He creates a nice crescendo with Scipio’s promise heart and soul to die
for his country (Corde animoque pio Scipio suscipio, Ep. 7.79); Bernard
Bauhuis, by contrast, creates a diminuendo with friendship manifested
‘in love, in manner, in speech, and action’ (cernitur amicus amore, more,
ore et re).44 Nicolas Reusner builds a whole volume out of such unpicking
of words.45 Nicole complains of Owen’s frivolas argutias on the grounds
that such puns are so peculiar to a particular language that they are
untranslatable.46 Owen’s virtuoso Ep. 6.12 manages a fivefold anagram
of certa, recta, arcet, creta, caret: Recta fides certa est, arcet mala schismata.
Non est, | Sicut creta, fides fictilis. Arte caret (only pointlessly translatable
as ‘An upright faith is sure, it shuns wicked divisions, it is not like
clay, a faith to be moulded. It is free of deception’) is equally tied
to the Latin; but it may excite admiration. Anagrams are an almost
obligatory feature of epigram collections, for they are one of the readier
ways of generating complications in given lemmata. Among many ana-
grams, Owen (Ep. 2.119) plays with roma and mora, drawing out an
untranslatable lesson about Rome’s luck in Hannibal’s delay. Herbert,
in a six-line epigram that provoked a reply from Urban VIII, has a
sevenfold example.47 Whole collections of such anagrammatic epigrams
were produced.48
Virtuosity aside, academic epigrams are marked by recourse to a reper-
tory of academic conceits. Owen jokes that the infinitive and optative
moods are close because there is no end of wishing (Ep. 1.29), or that
old men should avoid marriage because cornu (‘horn’, here the cuck-
old’s) is indeclinable (Ep. 5.108). Some are literary: a thief climbing the
gallows aims for the sky and makes for the stars quoting Sic, inquit,
petitur coelum, sic itur ad astra (‘In this way, he says, he aims for the sky,
in this way he makes for the stars’, combining Ovid, Fasti 1.307 and
Virgil, Aeneid 9.641). Into his epigram on the sick cured by the shadow
of St Peter, Richard Crashaw (Epigrammata sacra no. 296) introduces
the sic, sic iuvat ire sub umbras (‘thus, thus with pleasure to join the
shades below’) of Dido on the verge of suicide (Aeneid 4.660); when a
hostile crowd prepares to stone Jesus in the Temple, he recognizes the
antiqui . . . vestigia patris ‘the old traces of their father’, that is of Satan

44 45 46
Bauhuis 1620: 61. Reusner 1602a. Nicole 1996: 116.
47
Bauhuis 1620: 62, 28; Hutchinson 1941: 416.
48
Davison 1603; Cheeke 1613; Pyne 1626 offers a collection for Charles and associated royals. Reusner
1602b reprints Guillaume Leblanc’s De ratione anagrammatismi (1586).
 Epigram 91
(no. 194), but he borrows the vocabulary of Dido smitten with illicit
love: agnosco veteris vestigia flammae (‘I recognize the traces of an
ancient passion,’ Aeneid 4.22). Although often merely clever, the effect
is sometimes beautiful: when the tree withers at Christ’s command it
protests it can enjoy no nobler Autumn, Non possum Autumno nobiliore
frui (no. 236), a line that echoes Martial’s hunting dog in the arena
that could not have died a nobler death, Non potui fato nobiliore
mori (11.69).

The Christian Epigram

Already in Beatus Rhenanus’ preface to Thomas More’s Epigrammata
(1518), the Italian achievement of Pontano and Marullo is disparaged, and
the peculiarly English achievement of More is celebrated for its cultivation
of point and piety together.49 The Greek anthologies prepared by Soter and
Cornarius are challenged by the Latin anthologies prepared by Johannes
Gastius and Adam Siber.50 Joannes Secundus says he wrote as he did so that
schoolmasters would not get their hands on him (Ep. 1.58). But in the
preface to his Epigrammata Jakob Bidermann disparages Théodore de Bèze
for polluting Parnassus with his profane epigrams and writes gratefully to
his old teacher Matthaeus Rader (3.36), whom Donne called the ‘gelder’ of
Martial.51 Crashaw in a prefatory poem to his Epigrammata sacra says
goodbye to Catullus and Martial both.52 This move away from the profane
world closes down the variety of the epigram as traditionally conceived. The
Lutheran Johannes Burmeister’s sacred parodies of Martial are set with the
originals en face, placing the varieties of Roman sexuality beside the single-
mindedness of Old Testament violence, and the ordinary range of Roman
experience beside colourless piety. His preface acknowledges the frivolity,
profanity and obscenity of Martial but claims to drown the profanity in his
piety (profanitatem . . . pietate absorbeo).53 Lupercus’ fast-growing hair that
defeats his barber’s efforts to shave him (7.83) is thus drowned by a memory
of the sower whose fields are overrun by tares (Matthew 13.26).
The books of the Christian epigrammatists come across as agglomer-
ations of verses on a limited set of topics, for example the liturgical
calendar (as in the Jesuit Pierre-Juste Sautel’s Annus sacer poeticus), the

49 50
More 1984: 72–4. Gastius 1539; Siber 1564.
51
Martial 1.35 asked for his poems to be spared castration; Donne’s Epigram ‘Raderus’ charges
Matthaeus Raderus with ‘gelding’ the epigrams in his 1599 edition.
52
Crashaw 1970: 643 (Lectori 51–2). 53
Burmeister 1612: i, A3v.
92 robert cummings
Virgin Mary (as in Sautel’s Divae Magdalenae ignes) or the Passion (as in an
appendix to the Protestant Adam Siber’s Enchiridion pietatis puerilis).54
This is not to devalue the achievement. Herbert finds his voice in the
Passio discerpta (composed in the early 1620s), typically intense but typic-
ally understated and, as Kelliher suggests, perhaps designed for private
devotional ends.55 Crashaw’s Epigrammata sacra, though they are written
in fulfilment of his academic obligations, are sometimes rated as the best
Latin epigrams written by an Englishman.56 They develop their paradox-
ical contrivances from a habit of contradictoriness that begins in Christ
himself. Crashaw turns upside down the Pharisees’ complaint that Christ
eats with sinners (Luke 15.2): ‘O Christ is not their guest but their very
food’ (O non conviva est Christus, at ipse cibus) and the baptismal water of
the Jordan (John 1.31) rejoices ‘Happy, while it washes him, itself to be
washed’ (Felix! dum lavat hunc, ipsa lavatur aqua).57

Catullan Simplicity and the Ease of Composition

The taste for point and paradox was not universal. Montaigne prefers ‘the
incomparable even smoothness and the sustained sweetness and flourish-
ing beauty of the epigrams of Catullus, above the sharp goads with which
Martial enlivens the tails of his’.58 Colletet too asserts that wit should reside
not just in the tail, but in the whole extent of the poem, ‘its nerves and its
life-blood’.59 Catullus sang of veneres meras (‘undiluted love affairs’), says
Thomas Campion (Ep. 2.27), whereas Martial wrote about everything and
anything at all; and he adds, perhaps exploiting the dangerous ambiguity of
hic and ille: ‘this latter seems great to many, but the former impresses the
truly cultivated’ (Multis magnus hic est, bene ille cultis). Nicole praises ‘the
certain simple elegance, the tender and refined gaiety’ (simplex quaedam
mundities, ac mollis subtilisque festiuitas) of the epigrams from Catullus
included in the Delectus, but he also thinks that Catullus’ casualness is as
dangerous as Martial’s cleverness and disparages those of his imitators who,
‘wrapping their nonsense in hendecasyllables’, seem ‘wonderfully gay and
exquisite only to themselves’.60 Bourbon tells the reader to take his Nugae
for mere ‘trifles’ and not for treasures (no. 529); but Owen, writing in a
culture less at ease with itself, has no problem with rating them low: ‘Thou
trifles thought’st not, what thou so didst call: | I call them not, but think

54 55 56
Sautel 1656. Kelliher 1974: 35. Austin Warren, quoted in Larsen 1974: 93.
57 58
Crashaw 1970: nos 212, 121. Montaigne 2003: 462; 2.10 (‘On Books’).
59 60
Colletet 1965: 78. Nicole 1996: 122.
 Epigram 93
them trifles all’ (Ep. 1.42: Quas tu dixisti nugas, non esse putasti. | Non dico
nugas esse, sed esse puto).61
Against the tradition that parades cleverness, a mainly earlier and mainly
Italian or Italianate group cultivates gentlemanly indifference to any labour
of composition. Poliziano reflects ex tempore on Lorenzo de Medici’s oak
crown; Bourbon reflects ex tempore on the death of kings as he watches the
king drink.62 The later poets make more anxious professions of careless-
ness. Stradling invites his friends to accept the incultum . . . libellum
(‘unpolished pamphlet’) he sends them, and says he welcomes their
corrections.63 Owen, writing to Samuel Daniel, among the most fastidious
of vernacular poets, pretends it is no wonder if his verses are no good:
‘I never bite my nails as I compose, I never scratch my head’ (Si bona non
facio, quid mirum, epigrammata? Nunquam | Versificans ungues rodo,
caputve scabo, Ep. 2.172). Sometimes the affectation is misplaced: More
asks a poet why he bothers to say that his verses are extempore ‘since his
book says as much’ (Nam liber hoc loquitur).64
If the poet is sure of his audience, affectations of effortlessness are
compatible with refined ambitions for poetic reputation. Marullo addresses
Sannazaro and Pontano along with the courtly elite of Naples as being ‘of
one soul with him’ (Ep. 1.54: unanimi mei sodales), Bèze addresses his
friends (Buchanan and Macrin among them) as ‘elegant in the last degree’
(Ep. 63: perlepidi mei sodales) and in the preface to the 1569 printing of
his poems records the applause of his fellow poets for his epigram on the
birth of the dauphin François.65 The relaxed Campion sends his book,
with whatever absurdities (ineptiae) burden it, to the Mychelburne broth-
ers who will see it safely to international approval on the Rhine or Seine or
Tiber (Ep. 2.3). Some associations are less secure. Owen’s addresses and
dedications suggest a network of aristocrats and literary professionals, with
himself cast as dependent and impoverished. Stradling’s Epigrammata
advertises his connections with an index of his addressees. Elizabeth Jane
Weston represents herself as permanently in search of patronage and
protection; Stradling, in an oddly back-handed eulogy, pities her plight
(Ep. 2.106).66

61 62
Bourbon 2008: no. 529. Poliziano 1867: 117. Bourbon 2008: no. 484.
63 64
Stradling 1607: 85. More 1984: no. 240.
65
The poem in question is Ep. 47, the preface is quoted in Bèze 2001: 386.
66
Weston 2000: xxi lists some of the relevant poems.
94 robert cummings

Patrons, Friends and Lovers

Friendships or other associations more remote are consolidated with gifts.
Sometimes these are real gifts: Sannazaro (1.8) sends King Federico of
Aragon a beautiful epigram along with winter grapes, a horticultural
miracle. In the final epigram of his 1518 collection Erasmus presents
Wilhem Nesen with his pen, once Reuchlin’s, and has it speak of itself
as a pledge of friendship to be preserved forever (‘lest I, by whom posterity
will know so many names never to be erased, should die unknown’, Ne
peream obscurus, per quem tot nomina noscet Posteritas, longo nunquam
abolenda die).67 Most commonly (as in Martial 13.3) the precious gift is
the poem itself. Jean Du Bellay’s Xenia delivers to the political and literary
elite of France nothing more than jokes on their names.68 Marc-Antoine
Muret sends poems to Janus Vermelianus, saying he calls them ‘treasures
and riches’, but knowing they are not; in another poem he wonders what
to send Michael Lochiamus and rehearses what he cannot offer – ‘not
precious loads of gold, not statuary smoothed by an expert hand’ – before
confessing he has nothing at all to send apart from the poem.69 George
Buchanan sends Mildred Cecil gifts of verse worth more than perfume or
gold and immune from thieves: from her he hopes verses in return; from
Queen Mary Stuart he hopes for gold in return for his verses.70 Some are
turned satirically: Campion (Ep. 1.180) gives Edward Mychelburne advice
on stocking up with wood against the winter cold, and keeping his sexual
appetites in check. Secundus wishes his friend a mistress who will not ask
for money.71
It suited Bèze to say that his Juvenilia seemed to him too lightweight to
carry a dedication and he represents himself as a clown, ridiculus parumque
doctus (‘ludicrous and unlearned’, Ep. 2). (It was to be a gift to his enemies
that the patriarch of Geneva should have written poems on Candida’s hair
(Ep. 95) or her foot (Ep. 73).) Pontano addresses his Muse in a vocabulary
soaked in Catullus and calls on hendecasyllables to come crowding on him
with all their quips and cranks and wanton wiles; asking himself how to
repay Murullus for a gift of cheese, he thinks he’ll beg his Septimilla to
give him Centum basiola et catulliana, | Centum suaviola atque lesbiana
(‘A hundred little Catullan kisses, a hundred sweet little kisses like those of
Lesbia’).72 It is to Catullus that the modern amatory epigram owes its

67 68 69
Erasmus 1993: no. 61. Du Bellay 1985: 64–103. Muret 2009: 224–6 (nos. 104–5).
70 71
Buchanan 1725: ii, 436, 434. Secundus 1821: ii, 191–3.
72
Pontano 1977: ii, Hendecasyllabi 1.1, 29.
 Epigram 95
lightness of touch. Marullo is the love-poet of Neaera before anything else.
But Neaera is personally unidentifiable, and more importantly takes her
name from Virgil or Horace, the property of an imaginary to be shared
with Sannazaro, Secundus and Buchanan. For Marullo, Carol Kidwell lists
more than a dozen mistresses with generic names.73 Sometimes these
poetical (often Greek) names speak their sense Et petra es mea lux, et vere
Petra vocaris (Marullo Ep. 2.25: ‘You are stone, my light, and truly are you
called so’); or as when Campion (Ep. 1.179) asks Stella if she wants a place
in his lines or if it suffices for her to shine among the lesser stars of the
night sky. Sometimes it comes with the freight of classical use: Martial’s
Gellia is endlessly recycled in satirical epigrams. The easy sexual frankness
has a flip side: the culture of male sodalities encourages a casual obscenity
endemic in the epigram, usually associated with Catullus, possibly because
Martial was more easily ‘gelded’. Modern Latin poets, hiding behind the
obscurity of a learned language and addressing themselves to the prejudices
of their peers, were allowed great licence. Women are commonly abused
for growing old or using make-up or being unfaithful. McFarlane accuses
Buchanan of ‘corrosive’ misogyny.74 Older men are cast as avaricious
lawyers or murderous physicians, and they too are victims of obscene
abuse: Sannazaro’s epigram on the drunken Ufens (Ep. 2.20) would have
been unthinkable in any early modern vernacular.75

Vernacular Poetry and the Latin Epigram

When Rabelais in chapter 24 of Gargantua describes how the picnicking
Gargantua and Ponocrates composed Latin epigrams and then translated
them into French rondeaux et ballades (‘roundelays and songs for dancing’
says Urquhart’s version) his joke depends on our sense that diverse modes
have collided.76 If the category of epigram is relaxed to include proverbs,
riddles or moral axioms, then a case can be made for a long and healthy
traffic between vernacular and modern Latin. And there are cases of
convergence.77 The ‘parallelism or duplex structure’ of the Petrarchan
sonnet and the Petrarchist cultivation of paradox both recommended the
sonnet to the Latin epigrammatist.78 Sonnets from the Canzoniere are
translated into Latin by Bourbon, and into English by Watson.79 The

73 74 75
Kidwell 1989: 67. McFarlane 1981: 155. Ford 2010a.
76 77
Gargantua ch. 24 (tr. Urquhart). Most strikingly in France: see Ford 1993, Ford 2010b.
78
Prince 1954: 92; and see Colletet 1965: 190
79
Bourbon (2008: no. 504) translates Petrarch’s Canzoniere 134 (‘Pace non trovo’); so, precisely to
illustrate the witty use of contraries, does Tesauro (1670: 456). Thomas Watson translates
96 robert cummings
two hundred amatory epigrams of Girolamo Angeriano’s Erotopaegnion
(1520) are inspired in their details by Catullus and the elegists, but its larger
ambitions are owing to Petrarch; and for this reason Angeriano is
reabsorbed into both French (Michel d’Amboise) and English (Giles
Fletcher) vernaculars. Secundus too, having himself submitted to
vernacular influence, enjoys similar influence.80
But on any tighter definition, the association is problematic. Colletet
works hard to reject the pretended identity of the sonnet and the epigram
(though on the spurious grounds that the sonnet is weightier).81 Even in
the midst of a programmatic reinvention of French or English poetry, the
epigram resists easy accommodation. Vernacular translations of classical
epigrams are sometimes called epigrams like Marot’s (1547), or sometimes
not, like those in Tottel’s Miscellany (1557); in either case, the aggressive
domestication only exposes the distance between the traditions informing
original and translation. It remains surprising to find two of Thomas
More’s epigrams translated e cantione Anglicana (‘from an English song’).82
Or that Giovanni Marquale translates Alciato into madrigals.83 It is
shocking that Buchanan’s epigram on a bumpkin ended up as a catch set
by Purcell.84 Crashaw’s versions of his own Latin Epigrammata sacra
reinvent for English poetry a mode hitherto peculiar to the Latin. Jonson
endeavoured to do the same for the secular epigram, and Herrick’s Hesper-
ides is also indebted to the Latin epigram tradition.85
The Latin epigram was not ever quite salonfähig. It was too obscene, or it
was too clever. Its wit was too often false, or what Addison called ‘mixed’,
based on anagrams, chronograms, lipograms, acrostics, puns and quibbles,
charges often taken to be levelled at ‘metaphysical’ poetry, but which make
little sense outside the world of early modern Latin, or (he says) Martial: ‘we
find none of this mixed wit in Virgil, Lucretius, or Catullus; very little in
Horace, but a great deal of it in Ovid, and scarce anything else in Martial’.86
These vices are only the accidental consequence of an endeavour to be true
to the potential of the Latin language, whose perceived virtues the epigram
exploits. Dr Johnson is more than once recorded as objecting to epitaphs in
English: ‘he would never consent to disgrace the walls of Westminster
Abbey with an English inscription’ since only an ‘ancient and permanent

Canzoniere 164 (‘Or che ’l ciel’), and 364 (‘Tennemi Amor’) in his strenuously eccentric
Hekatompathia (1582).
80 81 82
Crane 1931; Ford 1993. Colletet 1965: 125–6, with notes at 128. More 1984: nos 81–2.
83
Alciato 1551, though he more commonly uses the strambotto.
84 85
Buchanan 1725: ii, 415; it was translated in D’Urfey 1690: 186. Braden 1978; Coiro 1988.
86
Addison and Steele 1965: i, 266, Letter 62, 11 May 1711.
 Epigram 97
language’ was fit for epitaphs.87 Permanence is not a consequence of
antiquity. John Sparrow, echoing Tesauro on the dense and ‘lapidary’
character of Tacitus’ prose (‘every word requires its own commentary’),
gives a better reason: that Latin is a concise language that dispenses with
troublesome prepositions and articles and particles; that its flexible word-
order, and its freedom in the use of participial phrases, make it easier to
contrive verbal mosaics and an effect of extraordinary compactness.88 This
is as good an account as any of what the Latin epigram aspires to.
Considering the virtues of the Latin language against those of Greek,
Quintilian (Institutes 12.10.36–9) acknowledges that Latin falls short of
Greek in grace and delicacy, but, he says, ‘let us be stronger; we are worsted
in subtlety; let us prevail by weight, and if they have greater precision, let us
outdo them in fullness of expression’.

FURTHER READING
Relevant bibliographies are in IJsewijn and Sacré 1998: 111 31. Money 2015
complements this essay. Wright 1637 is the most accessible of early dedicated
collections of neo Latin epigrams. Schnur 1982 is a good but slight modern
anthology with German prose translations. Dodd 1870 includes the most
generous selection of epigrams available in English. Dana Sutton’s Philological
Museum (www.philological.bham.ac.uk/) includes Latin epigrams by English
poets, often from scattered printed and manuscript sources. The pages on the
diffusion of the epigram in Burckhardt 1860 are classic. Laurens 1989 (in French)
gives the richest history of the genre, and the fullest general account of its revival
in the Renaissance. On the Latin transformations of the Greek epigram in
Renaissance Italy and France (and more) Hutton 1935 and Hutton 1946 are
unsurpassable. The account in Hudson 1947 is witty as well as informative.
Binns 1990 (chapters 4, 5 and 10) is particularly helpful on the uses and
manners of epigram. The heritage of Martial is discussed in Hausman 1980,
Sullivan 1991, Fitzgerald 2007, Livingstone and Nisbet 2010. Gaisser 1993 has
the last word on the Renaissance reception of Catullus. On the importance of
Jesuit poetics see Raspa 1983. Two recent collections of essays, De Beer et al. 2009
(in English and Italian) and Cardini and Coppini 2009 (in Italian) are worth
attention. De Beer, Enenkel and Rijser includes specialized case studies and essays
on epigram theory, obscenity, ‘point’. Cardini and Coppini includes specialized
case studies and essays on the informing traditions derived from the Greek
Anthology, Martial and Catullus.

87 88
Boswell 1964: iii, 38 and 273, n. 245. Sparrow 1969: 139; Tesauro 2000: 598–9.
 chapter 6

Elegy
L. B. T. Houghton

In its classical incarnation, the genre of elegy was defined less by its
characteristic mood or occasion than by its metrical form, the elegiac
couplet – and the same is true of its neo-Latin counterpart.1 That is not
to say that mournful meditations of the kind now familiar to readers of
vernacular ‘elegy’ do not appear among the corpus of either ancient or
later Latin elegiac poetry: as Propertius (3.18) had lamented the untimely
death of Augustus’ nephew Marcellus, and Ovid (Amores 3.9) had marked
the passing of his elegiac predecessor Tibullus, so Cristoforo Landino, in
poem 3.18 of his Xandra, mourns the young Cosimo de’ Medici, grand-
son of the Florentine pater patriae,2 while Ugolino Verino and Paolo
Pansa commemorate their poetic colleagues Francesco Filelfo and Fran-
cesco Maria Molza respectively.3 Giovanni Gioviano Pontano devoted an
entire two-book collection, his De tumulis, to brief elegies on notable
individuals and family members, following the model of Ausonius’
Parentalia.4 Such was the attention accorded in education across Europe
to the composition of what were known in the classrooms of England as

1
Cf. especially Luck 1969: 27. On the development of ‘elegy’ in the vernacular, along rather different
lines, see e.g. Beissner 1941; Scollen 1967; Clark 1975; Sacks 1987; Kay 1990; Comboni and Di Ricco
2003 and essays in Weisman 2010.
2
In the third book of the Xandra, Landino also commemorates his brother (3.4) and his old teacher Carlo
Marsuppini (3.7), while in his Carmina varia (poems 1, 2 and 9) he eulogizes three more figures: for text
and translation see Chatfield 2008. For further examples of neo-Latin funeral elegy, see especially the
outpouring of verses on the death of the Florentine beauty Albiera degli Albizzi (see Perosa 2000:
189–94), including elegies by Poliziano (Elegiae 7: Perosa and Sparrow 1979: 126–32) and Naldo de’ Naldi
(Elegiae 1.29: Juhász 1934: 24–6), and epigrams by Alessandro Braccesi (Epigrammata 16–23: Perosa 1943:
108–11). See also Ludwig 2001 on the epicedia of Petrus Lotichius Secundus.
3
Verino, Epigrammata 5.10: Bausi 1998: 461–6 (also Arnaldi, Gualdo Rosa and Monti Sabia 1964:
874–7); Pansa, De Molsae obitu elegia: Serassi 1747: 261–6, with Houghton 2013: 303.
4
For Pontano see Pontano 1948: 189–258 (full text) and selections in Arnaldi, Gualdo Rosa and Monti
Sabia 1964: 528–87. The fifth book of Verino’s Epigrammata is likewise given over to funerary pieces
(Bausi 1998: 427–83), while Joachim Du Bellay’s Poemata of 1558 also contains a series of Tumuli,
along with his Elegiae, Amores and epigrams (for analysis see Tucker 2009). Helius Eobanus Hessus
composed a book of Epicedia: see Vredeveld 1990: 103–81; Gräßer 1994.

98
 Elegy 99
‘longs and shorts’,5 however, that the range of subjects considered appro-
priate for treatment in elegiac metre was nothing short of vast. No brief
survey can do justice to the breadth, the variety and the sheer quantity of
neo-Latin literature composed in elegiac couplets; as John Milton
observed in his Elegia sexta, fickle elegy is the darling of many gods,
and she invites anyone to her rhythms (Namque Elegia levis multorum
cura deorum est, | Et vocat ad numeros quemlibet illa suos, 49–50).6 The
pages that follow can offer little more than a fleeting impression of the
many-sided elegiac production of the Renaissance and subsequent cen-
turies, much of which has passed into oblivion or has only recently begun
to receive detailed scholarly attention.

Love, Loss and Longing

Julius Caesar Scaliger, in the sections dedicated to elegy in his Poetices libri
septem (published posthumously in 1561), recognizes the adaptable charac-
ter of the elegiac couplet, despite his primary concentration on the amatory
associations of the genre: after outlining at length the various stock
situations of love poetry through which an elegiac collection should move,
Scaliger concludes Epicedia quoque et epitaphia et epistolae hoc genere
poematis recte conficiuntur (‘Eulogies too, and epitaphs and letters, are
properly executed in this kind of poem’).7 Literary theorists of the early
modern period tended to follow Horace’s famous definition (Ars poetica
75–6) of the original functions of elegy as first querimonia (‘complaint’,
‘lamentation’) and then acknowledgement of a vow fulfilled, although the
interpretations they placed on the Roman poet’s formulation differed.8 In
his variation on Ovid’s encounter with the personifications of Elegy – her
two feet of unequal length – and Tragedy in Amores 3.1, the Dutchman
Joannes (or Janus) Secundus represented in his dream-vision two separate
manifestations of the elegiac genre, reflecting the twofold division of
funereal and erotic elegy (Elegiae 3.7.3–6):9
Altera, lugubrem praetendens moesta cupressum,
Sculpebat memores in cava busta notas;

5 6
Clarke 1959: 56, 139. Text in Revard 2009b: 180.
7
The whole passage is quoted in translation by Parker 2012: 476; for the text see Deitz and Vogt-Spira
1994–2011: 3.202, and on elegy see also 1.414–16. All translations in this chapter are my own.
8
See Ludwig 1976: 171–7, esp. 175–7.
9
For text, translation and comment see Endres 1981: 189–95; there has been some discussion of the
identity of altera at 3.7.3, but it seems fairly clear that this figure should be taken as the embodiment
of another facet of the elegiac genre (see Endres 1981: 194).
100 l. b. t. houghton
Altera fragrabat myrti genialis odore:
Sancta Venus, quanto clauda decore fuit!
The one, sadly holding before her the mournful cypress, was carving commemora
tive marks on hollow tombs; the other was fragrant with the scent of genial
myrtle holy Venus, how pretty she was with her limp!

Despite her split personality, however, neo-Latin Elegy retained to a large

extent the erotic proclivities bestowed on her ancient ancestor by the classical
elegists Propertius, Tibullus and Ovid: the opening poem of the second
book of Ugolino Verino’s Flametta declares baldly Iurgia blanditiae lacri-
maeque precesque minaeque, | Est elegi proprium carminis istud opus (‘Insults,
enticements, tears, entreaties and threats – that’s the proper business of
elegiac poetry’, Flametta 2.1.39–40).10 The earliest series of Renaissance love
elegies, although their focus was by no means exclusively erotic, set the
pattern for a revival of the classical template of collections of pieces in elegiac
metre addressed to a unique, eponymous love object: so Giovanni Marrasio’s
Angelinetum celebrates the attractions of his beloved Angela Piccolomini,11
while the Cinthia of Enea Silvio Piccolomini, later Pope Pius II, appropriates
the name of Propertius’ literary sweetheart, which the poet self-consciously
places at the beginning of his collection in emulation of his ancient
exemplar.12 This tradition was maintained in the following decades of the
fifteenth century by Marcantonio Aldegati’s Cynthia, Landino’s Xandra and
Verino’s Flametta,13 and although later volumes tend to sport more generic
titles (generally Elegiae or Amores, or some other indication of the erotic
content of the work, such as Tito Vespasiano Strozzi’s Eroticon libri and
Girolamo Angeriano’s Erotopaegnion),14 the themes and emphases exhibited
by such collections remain largely constant, not to say inert. In general, the
conception of love on display in these works reflects the all-consuming,
uncontrollable passion embraced and deplored by the classical elegists, with
its ignominious debasement of the freeborn lover to a state of abject
servitude to his mistress’s every whim. Any reader of Propertius will instantly
recognize both the language and the sentiments of the following lines, which

10
Mencaraglia 1940: 60; see also Flametta 1.2.3–4 (ibid., 20).
11
Text in Resta 1976; for analysis see Pieper 2008: 78–83, 122–31 and Bisanti 1997.
12
For the text see Van Heck 1994. Discussions include Pieper 2008: 83–90; Albanese 1999; Charlet
1997; Galand-Hallyn 1993; Paparelli 1987 and 1964; Baca 1971–2.
13
For Aldegati’s elegies, see Bottari 1980: 21–71, 85–143; for Verino’s Flametta, Mencaraglia 1940
(selections in Arnaldi, Gualdo Rosa and Monti Sabia 1964: 844–65).
14
See Della Guardia 1916 (Strozzi) and Wilson 1995 (Angeriano); some collections, such as Fausto
Andrelini’s Amores sive Livia (see Tournoy-Thoen 1982), combine both types of nomenclature.
 Elegy 101
are in many respects typical of the amatory strain of Renaissance elegy
(Landino, Xandra 1.3.33–40):
Tunc tua me primum certissima, Xandra, sagitta
fixit et in pectus duxit amoris iter,
tunc primum insolitos mens nostra experta furores
coepit venturis tristior esse malis,
tunc mea libertas miserum me prima refugit
et coepi duro subdere colla iugo,
tunc primum sensi quae insania verset amantes,
sub specie mellis quanta venena latent.
Then first your most unerring arrow, Xandra, transfixed me and made a way for love
into my breast; then first my mind, having felt the unaccustomed frenzy, began to be
gloomier at the evils to come; then my first freedom fled from me in my wretched
ness, and I began to submit my neck to the harsh yoke; then first I felt what madness
whirls lovers round, how many poisons lurk beneath the outward show of honey.
But as the classical love elegy could accommodate both the tormented
infatuation of a Propertius and the cheerful libertinism of an Ovid, so its
neo-Latin incarnation allows ample scope for a variety of different forms of
and attitudes towards love. The promiscuous end of the spectrum is
perhaps best seen in Ludovico Ariosto’s De diversis amoribus, probably
the closest neo-Latin literature gets to Mambo No. 5 (lines 1–6):15
Est mea nunc Glycere, mea nunc est cura Lycoris,
Lyda modo meus est, est modo Phyllis amor.
Primas Glaura faces renovat, movet Hybla recentes,
Mox cessura igni Glaura vel Hybla novo.
Nec mihi diverso nec eodem tempore saepe
Centum vesano sunt in amore satis.
Now Glycere is my darling, now it’s Lycoris, just now Lyda’s my love, just now
it’s Phyllis. Glaura rekindles my first flame, Hybla sets off a fresh one but Glaura
or Hybla will soon give way to a new passion. Neither at different times nor often
at the same time are a hundred enough for me, crazy as I am, in love [or ‘for me
in crazy love’].

Nor need such antics be confined to heterosexual liaisons: Pacifico Massimi’s

Hecatelegium, an assortment of one hundred elegies (as its name suggests)
which survives in two different redactions, the first published in Florence in
1489, gained a degree of notoriety for its openly pederastic content, prompting
15
For the text see Segre 1954: 88–93; for discussion of the poem, see Newman 1986: 302–5 and 1979. In
lines 5–6, Ariosto is trumping Ovid’s centum sunt causae cur ego semper amem (‘there are a hundred
causes why I should always be loving’, Amores 2.4.10).
102 l. b. t. houghton
from Lilio Gregorio Giraldi the grudging assessment Pacificus Asculanus
potuisset in aliquo poetarum numero haberi, nisi foedis amoribus versus inqui-
nasset; fuit in elegia neque infans neque elinguis (‘Pacifico of Ascoli could have
been held in some reckoning among poets, had he not befouled his verses with
revolting loves; in elegy he was neither lacking in speech nor uneloquent’, De
poetis nostrorum temporum 1.80).16 At the other extreme of fifteenth-century
decorum lay the respectability of happily married life, and this too came to be
considered a fit subject for the traditionally frivolous medium of elegy,
principally in Pontano’s three-book collection De amore coniugali – a poetic
contribution to what Anthony D’Elia has called ‘the Renaissance of marriage
in fifteenth-century Italy’ (Cesare Borgia’s court poet, Francesco Sperulo, also
wrote elegies on the same subject: Giraldi, De poetis 1.148).17 Here the
domestication of the previously wanton genre is programmatically announced
in the bridal attire with which the figure of Elegy is now to be decked out
in addition to her Ovidian attributes of myrtle and elaborate coiffure
(De amore coniugali 1.1.1–4; the ankle-length stola of the Roman matron
proclaimed her married status):18
Huc ades et nitidum myrto compesce capillum,
huc ades ornatis, o Elegia, comis
inque novam venias cultu praedivite formam,
laxa fluat niveos vestis ad usque pedes.
Be present here and restrain your gleaming locks with myrtle; be present here,
Elegy, with hair adorned, and may you enter into a new shape with sumptuous
adornment, may a loose garment flow all the way down to your snow white feet.
Finally, it should be noted that although Secundus explicitly claims to
be conjuring the spirit of Propertius (Elegiae 2.1),19 the love elegy of the
Renaissance and beyond was by no means an attempt simply to resurrect
and replicate the well-worn topoi of Roman romance. There were new
elements too, chief among them the model of the vernacular love poetry of
Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch), whose influence can be felt strongly in the

16
Quotation from Giraldi in Grant 2011: 52. For the text of Massimi (or Massimo) see Desjardins
1986 and Desjardins Daude 2008, and for discussion see e.g. Desjardins 1979; Galand 1990; Lacroix
1999.
17
D’Elia 2004. Full text of Pontano’s De amore coniugali in Roman 2014; also Pontano 1948: 125–85,
and selections in Arnaldi, Gualdo Rosa and Monti Sabia 1964: 448–527. For comment see e.g.
Monti Sabia 1999; Wilkins 1974: 168 calls it ‘[t]he best of all his poetry’, while Rand 1925:
154 remarks that ‘Ovid might be mystified at such a title, but would admire the contents; for this
proper poet has more sensuous charm and passion than any of the Roman poets of love, with the
single exception of Catullus.’ On Sperulo, see Gwynne 2015.
18 19
Roman 2014: 2. For the text see Murgatroyd 2000: 57–9.
 Elegy 103
elegiac compositions of his Florentine imitators in particular.20 As Petrarch
himself had drawn on the resources of erotic imagery and metaphor he
found in classical love elegy, so the Italian poet’s own characteristic
conceits and paradoxes were eagerly assimilated into the thematic reper-
toire of later Latin elegists; in the Latin elegy of the Quattrocento, the
Petrarchan antitheses of sweet and bitter (see e.g. Naldi, Elegiae 1.18) and of
fire and ice (e.g. Landino, Xandra 1.5.41–2) are as inescapable as the Roman
elegists’ servitium amoris. A striking example of the permeation of Pet-
rarchan material into neo-Latin love elegy can be seen in Landino, Xandra
1.14, a cosmetically classicized paraphrase-translation of Petrarch’s Rerum
vulgarium fragmenta 132; and Landino’s successors likewise borrowed,
adapted and translated from Petrarch in their elegiac productions.21
Once influential contemporary figures such as Landino had revived and
reinvigorated the genre, moreover, their own works came to be a source of
inspiration and exploitation for new practitioners in turn: the Florentine
elegists Naldo de’ Naldi, Ugolino Verino and Alessandro Braccesi, for
instance, all mined the Xandra as well as the classical sources in formulat-
ing their composite brand of elegy (in Flametta 1.5, indeed, Verino main-
tains that Xandra has surpassed Cynthia and Nemesis – i.e. the elegies
of Propertius and Tibullus – but that Flametta will now be the glory of the
Etruscan race).22

Politics, Pontiffs and Pomegranates

It was not just mistresses, real or imaginary, whose finer points could
be broadcast via the medium of elegy. Compliments – often no less
extravagant – could also be paid to actual or potential patrons, whose
favours were solicited every bit as assiduously as those of the capricious
puellae with whom they sometimes had to jostle for space within the
confines of the elegiac collection.23 Once they had rung the changes on

20
See especially Fantazzi 1996; Coppini 2006; Houghton 2013: 296–8.
21
See de’ Naldi, Elegiae 1.9, 15, 20; Braccesi, Amorum libellus 11 (with note below). Landino also
includes a foray into Petrarchan sestina among his elegiac collection (Xandra 1.7). There is another
Latin version of RVF 132 (and others), this time in hexameters, in Thomas Watson’s Hekatompathia
(1582).
22
See Parker 2012: 478–9; also Perosa 1941: 52. For the text of Naldi’s Elegiae, see Juhász 1934, and for
Braccesi’s two libelli, see Perosa 1943.
23
The point is tellingly made by the opening couplet of an epigram by Poliziano on the elegies of
Naldo de’ Naldi: Dum celebrat Medicem Naldus, dum laudat amicam, | Et pariter gemino raptus amore
canit . . . (‘While Naldo celebrates Medici, while he praises his mistress, and carried away equally by
his twin loves makes poetry . . . ’, Epigrammata Latina 24.1–2: see Poliziano 1867: 122).
104 l. b. t. houghton
the standard episodes of the literary love affair, whether from exhaustion of
interest in the erotic motifs inherited from their predecessors or (perhaps
more likely) as part of a consciously staged withdrawal from amatory
themes in emulation of what they believed they found in the later books
of Propertius,24 the elegists regularly turned their attention to the contem-
porary political scene. In the case of the Florentine poets just mentioned,
the natural focus for such adulation was the city’s ruling dynasty, the
Medici: so, in the third book of Landino’s collection, the praises of Xandra
are replaced with commendation of Cosimo and his son Piero,25 while the
equivalent book of de’ Naldi’s elegies, following occasional earlier accol-
ades addressed to members of the Medici and the Este families in the
second book (Elegiae 2.39, 42, 43 – the last in hexameters), consists
entirely of homage to and laments for the scions of Florence’s leading
house. Elsewhere, although the classic vehicle for immortalizing the
exploits of a ruler remained the martial hexameter epic (see Chapter 12
in this volume), the current of elegiac encomium maintained an equally
relentless course: Italian humanists resident at the English court, among
them Johannes Opicius, Pietro Carmeliano and Andrea Ammonio,
extolled successive Tudor monarchs in congratulatory couplets on every
suitable occasion;26 Helius Eobanus Hessus supplied an acclamation of
Charles V on behalf of the city of Nuremberg on the emperor’s entry into
Germany in 1530;27 and in 1598 the fifteen-year-old Dutch prodigy
Hugo Grotius, later the pre-eminent jurist of his age, addressed a long
elegy to the young Prince of Condé, soon to become heir presumptive to
the throne of France.28 Other contemporary events were treated in a less
celebratory vein, in keeping with the sorrowful associations of the elegiac
genre: Francesco Franchini, for example, narrates his experience of the
wreck of the emperor’s fleet off the coast of Africa in 1541,29 while the
precocious Pole Klemens Janicki (Clemens Ianicius), who despite his
early death at the age of twenty-seven produced a substantial corpus of
elegiac verse, laments the sufferings of Hungary and Russia in the wake of
Turkish depredations.30

24
For this aspect of Landino’s elegiac collection, see Pieper 2008: 265–72.
25
See Landino, Xandra 3.1, 3.3.91–142, 3.7.163–8, 3.15, 3.17.135–58, 3.19 (also 3.16, in hexameters).
26
See Carlson 1987a, 1987b, 1993: 37–59 (Carmeliano) and 2002 (Opicius); Pizzi 1958, Wyatt 2005:
59–61 (Ammonio); also Rundle 1995.
27 28
For the text see Vredeveld 1990: 76–89. See Rabbie 1992: 482–92.
29
Text in Perosa and Sparrow 1979: 269–73.
30
Perosa and Sparrow 1979: 543–6; for Janicki and his Latin poetry see Krókowski 1966 and Segel
1989: 227–49.
 Elegy 105
As a major source of patronage for aspiring poets and artists, and an
institution with claims to temporal power no less strenuously prosecuted
than those of other contenders for political hegemony in Europe, the
papacy acted as an obvious magnet for hopeful, strategic or committed
panegyrists. We have laudatory elegies directed towards Pius II – himself,
as already noted, a former elegiac poet – by Lodrisio Crivelli of Milan, who
hails the return of the Golden Age in the pontificate of the Sienese
humanist (Aurea te redeunt, Pie, principe saecula nobis. | Aureus, en, terras
te duce partus habet, ‘The Golden Age is returning to us, Pius, under your
principate; see, under your leadership golden offspring possesses the
earth’: poem 4, lines 1–2), and by Naldo de’ Naldi (Elegiae 2.3).31 Julius
II received elegiac tributes from Pietro Bembo and Pacifico Massimi,
similarly declaring the rebirth of primitive felicity under the heraldic oak
of the Della Rovere;32 and Giovanni Francesco Bordini, an important early
member of the Oratorian movement who was later promoted to the
archbishopric of Avignon, applauds the extensive building projects of
Sixtus V in his collection of elegies, epigrams and engravings De rebus
praeclare gestis a Sisto V. Pon. Max., beginning Magna facis, maiora dies
moliris in omneis. | Det tantum Christus tempora longa tibi (‘You are doing
great things, and you are planning greater things every day. May Christ
only grant you long times [i.e. a long life]’, lines 1–2).33
Further departures from the conventional amatory and funereal trajec-
tories of elegy as defined by contemporary literary taxonomy exhibit the
most miscellaneous array of subjects. The diffusion of neo-Latin literature
benefited considerably from the introduction of the printing press, which
provided material for at least two elegiac endeavours: the printer, editor
and lexicographer Henri Estienne (Henricus Stephanus) published in
1569 an Artis typographicae querimonia (‘Complaint of the art of
printing’), in which the personified art laments the disrepute into which
she is being brought by illiterate printers, while Sebastian Brant, at an
earlier stage in the development of the press, offered a more jubilant
salute to the service rendered by Gutenberg’s discovery in spreading
learning and culture among his countrymen.34 Seemingly no constituent
of the natural world, moreover, whether wild or domesticated, animate or
inanimate, was immune from the attentions of neo-Latin elegists:

31
Smith 1962; Juhász 1934: 28–31.
32
Bembo, De Julii pontificatu (Pecoraro 1959: 165–6); Massimi, Hecatelegium B 5.5, 5.7, 5.8, 5.9, 5.10,
6.1, 6.3, 6.4, 6.7, 8.4, 8.7, 9.8, 10.5.
33
Bordini 1588, quotation from p. 3; see also Mandel 1988: 48–9.
34
Stephanus 1569; text of Brant in Perosa and Sparrow 1979: 409–11.
106 l. b. t. houghton
Alessandro Braccesi deplores the loss of his stolen cat (Braccesi, Lib. Sec.
Epist. 10); Nicolaus Hussovianus composed for Pope Leo X an elegiac
poem of over a thousand lines on the physique and ferocity of the bison,
and the methods of hunting that animal (Carmen de statura, feritate ac
venatione bisontis, 1523); Francesco Maria Molza sends a commendatory
note to accompany a gift of hen’s eggs (Elegiae 2.10); and Iacopo
Sannazaro rounds off his second book of elegies with a paean to pom-
egranates (also Elegiae 2.10).35 The appearance of mala punica in this
context is rendered less incongruous than it might seem by Sannazaro’s
presentation of the pomegranates as an accoutrement of the peaceful,
convivial, erotic world traditionally associated with the classical genre of
elegy (Elegiae 2.10.23–30):
Nec nostrae populos armant in proelia gemmae,
nec suadent magnos clam violare deos.
Sed semper placidis visunt convivia mensis:
stant ubi iucundo pocula plena mero.
Illic nos tenerae vir porrigit ipse puellae,
porrigit et cupido fida puella viro.
Pacis opus sumus, et pacati munus amoris,
quod capit a Satyro Nais amata suo.
And our jewels don’t arm nations for battles, nor do they induce people to do
violence to the great gods in secret; but they’re always attending parties where the
tables are peaceful, where the goblets stand filled with pleasing wine. There the
man himself offers us to his tender girl, and the faithful girl offers us to her eager
man. We are the work of peace, and the gift of peaceful love, the gift that the
beloved Naiad receives from her Satyr.

Art, Architecture and Archangels

Despite this eclecticism, a number of recurring subjects favoured by neo-
Latin elegists may nonetheless be distinguished, in addition to those
already identified. As Propertius had devoted an elegy (2.12) to elucidating
the iconography of Cupid, and Petrarch had praised Simone Martini’s
celestial portrait of Laura (Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, 77–8), so the elegists
of the Renaissance enthusiastically celebrate the accomplishment of con-
temporary artists, or pay tribute to their mastery in polished epitaphs,
exalting some latter-day Phidias or Apelles to the level of (or even above)
35
Braccesi: Perosa 1943: 83–4; Nicolaus Hussovianus, Carmen de bisonte: Krókowski 1959 (excerpts in
Perosa and Sparrow 1979: 533–7, and Laurens and Balavoine 1975: 2.81–9; for discussion see Segel
1989: 138–60); Molza: Scorsone and Sodano 1999: 59–60; Sannazaro: Putnam 2009: 226–9.
 Elegy 107
his ancient precursors.36 On occasion, art and text could work together
more closely in the service of erudition: five extant manuscripts preserve
the text of Ludovico Lazzarelli’s late fifteenth-century De gentilium deorum
imaginibus, a two-book compendium of Latin elegies describing images of
the classical deities accompanied by illustrations after engravings attributed
to Mantegna.37 Likewise discussions of architecture, and accounts of cities,
historic monuments and landscapes, could all be couched in the form of
elegiac verse. Julius Caesar Scaliger’s series of Urbes covers a disparate
assortment of locations, while Caspar Barlaeus praised the cities of Holland,
and Arthur Johnston and his earlier kinsman John both wrote
Encomia urbium on Scottish towns.38 The Elogia of Janus Vitalis include
tableaux of Rome ancient and modern;39 and poetic records of impressions
of places visited and sites observed became popular among the learned
travellers of the sixteenth century.40 Wistful, moralizing or antiquarian
reflections on the ruins of ancient civilisations, particularly those of the
Eternal City herself, came to occupy a regular place among the repertoire of
neo-Latin poets, and for such melancholy diversions the elegy provided the
obvious literary mode (see e.g. Du Bellay, Poemata 1.2.115–16: Nunc iuvat
exesas passim spectare columnas, | Et passim veterum templa sepulta deum,
‘Now it is pleasing to look upon columns eaten away on all sides, and on all
sides the buried temples of the old gods’).41 But the metre could be
harnessed to chronicle the glories of the present as well as the faded
splendour of the past, and in particular to promote the achievements of
modern authors: Ovid’s catalogue of contemporary poets in Epistulae
ex Ponto 4.16 may have served as an archetype for Francesco Arsilli’s

36
For examples see Perosa and Sparrow 1979: 52–3 (T. V. Strozzi on Pisanello), 182 (Ariosto on
Raphael), 202 (Castiglione on Raphael), 323–5 (Janus Pannonius on Mantegna). For the comparison
with the ancients, see especially Verino, Flametta 2.8.5–6 and 2.45.101–6 (Mencaraglia 1940: 66, 95;
Arnaldi, Gualdo Rosa and Monti Sabia 1964: 862–3), Epigrammata 3.23 (Arnaldi, Gualdo Rosa and
Monti Sabia 1964: 872–5; Perosa and Sparrow 1979: 91–2; Bausi 1998: 324–8). On the Renaissance
phenomenon of poetry on painting, see generally Freedman 2011: 208–13.
37
See O’Neal 1997. Lazzarelli’s other works include the Fasti Christianae religionis, a Christian
counterpart to Ovid’s elegiac almanac: see especially Fritsen 2000, Miller 2003 and text in
Bertolini 1991.
38
Scaliger 1546: 374–412; Barlaeus 1630; Geddes 1895: 255–87. On Encomia urbium in general, see
Hammer 1937 and Slits 1990 (cited by De Beer 2014: 397), and on the Johnstons, see especially
Crawford 2006: 86–103 and 2007: 186–9; Manuwald 2010; Vine 2012.
39
See Tucker 1985 and 2006; Smith 1977 and 1989.
40
For examples see Perosa and Sparrow 1979: 446–9 (Georgius Sabinus), 486–8 (Joannes Secundus;
for discussion see Coppel 2004).
41
Perosa and Sparrow 1979: 394–7 at 396; for discussion see Tucker 2006, esp. 101–8, and McGowan
2000: 187–94. Other examples include Landino, Xandra 2.30 (see Charlet 2000) and Sannazaro,
Elegiae 2.9. On the poetry of ruins, see generally Cooper 1989.
108 l. b. t. houghton
De poetis urbanis, which celebrates the flowering of literature under Leo X,
and for John Leland’s enumeration of recent and practising Latin poets,
among whom pride of place is given to Pontano.42
Not least among the uses of neo-Latin elegy was its appropriation for the
purposes of religion, even where this might appear to sit rather uneasily
with the erotic subject matter traditionally purveyed by this medium: in
the pages of Francesco Maria Molza, an elegy on the pregnant Lycoris
(Elegiae 3.4) is immediately followed by a piece on the archangel Michael
(Elegiae 3.5), while at the very end of Molza’s collection of elegies, a
complaint Ad Iuliam puellam formosissimam (‘To Julia, a Very Beautiful
Girl’, Elegiae 4.5) precedes the concluding contemplation De Christo
crucifixo (‘On Christ Crucified’, Elegiae 4.6).43 So little tainted, apparently,
was the elegiac genre by the scandalous escapades of its classical past, that
the elegy could even be pressed into service as a vehicle for communicating
the truths of scripture. In the popular genre of psalm paraphrase, the
elegiac couplet reached the height of its celebrity early, with Eobanus
Hessus’ translation of the complete Psalter into elegiacs (Psalterium uni-
versum carmine elegiaco redditum, 1537), although in the following century
Arthur Johnston also used the metre for all but one of his versions.44
In George Buchanan’s influential rendering of the psalms (first printed
1565/6), the elegy had to content itself with just three entries (Psalms 88,
114 and 137),45 while Maffeo Barberini, the future Pope Urban VIII,
included four elegiac items (Psalms 50, 76, 136, 147) among his selection
of psalm and other biblical paraphrases in a variety of different metres.46 In
some cases, the choice of metre is clearly dictated by the tone of the
original psalm: hence, most appropriately, both Buchanan and Barberini
employ the doleful distich for the famous ‘waters of Babylon’, Psalm 137
(136 in Barberini).

42
Arsilli, De poetis urbanis (Francolini 1837: 6–49; see also IJsewijn 1997b: 344–64, and discussion in
Pettinelli 1999); Leland, De quibusdam nostri saeculi poetis (Perosa and Sparrow 1979: 502–4). See
also Verino, Flametta 2.45 (Mencaraglia 1940: 92–7).
43
Scorsone and Sodano 1999: 70–3, 73–4, 106–9, 109–12.
44
See Fuchs 2008 (Eobanus Hessus); Johnston 1637 (on the latter, see also Green 2012). Eobanus
Hessus was also the author of three books of Heroides Christianae, elegiac epistles from heroines of
the Christian tradition modelled on Ovid’s mythological Heroides (see Chapter 8 in this volume,
and on the vogue for neo-Latin Christianizing Heroides see Eickmeyer 2012). On Latin psalm
paraphrases, see generally Gaertner 1956.
45
For text, translation and commentary, see Green 2011; on Buchanan’s elegiac psalms, see also Wall
1977, cogently criticized by Green 2011: 79–80.
46
Barberini 1640: 29–31, 37–9, 39–41, 131–4. On Barberini’s poetry, see especially Rietbergen 2006:
95–142.
 Elegy 109
Nor was it just the psalms that were accorded elegiac treatment. Here,
for instance, is the creation of man, from the opening elegy of Pontano’s
De laudibus divinis (1.63–74):47

Et iam quadrupedes fetus, obnoxia morti

corpora, plumosos edideratque greges,
tum Deus humanos effingere molliter artus
membraque de tenui ducere coepit humo.
Cunctaque formarat studio perfecta magistro
quaeque artem referant artificemque suum;
mox auram aetherio de fomite fundit in illum:
‘Vive,’ ait ‘et proprio membra labore fove.’
Arcanae mox partem animae de mente profunda
libat et erecti spirat in ora viri:
‘Dux’ ait ‘haec hominum generi sit et ipsa magistra,
et sua constituant hac duce seque regant.’
And now he had produced the four footed offspring, bodies subject to death,
and the feathered flocks; then God began to mould gently human limbs, and
to fashion body parts from the insubstantial earth. And he had shaped
everything, finished off with masterful attention, to tell of the art and its artist.
Then he infuses breath into the body from the heavenly kindling: ‘Live,’ he
says, ‘and sustain your limbs by your own labour.’ Then he pours out a
portion of concealed soul from his fathomless mind, and breathes into the
mouth of the upright man: ‘Let this’, he says, ‘be the guide and master for the
human race, and by its guidance let them manage their affairs and keep
themselves in order.’

The exploitation of elegy for religious ends burgeoned during the

Counter Reformation and into the seventeenth century, as witnessed in
the works of the prolific Flemish Jesuit Sidron De Hossche (Sidronius
Hosschius).48 First published together in 1656, so successful were De
Hossche’s devotional elegies among the Catholic faithful of Europe that
a number of his poems appeared in a free French translation by Lancelot
Deslandes in 1756, and in a Castilian version by an anonymous ‘religioso
observante’ just under forty years later.49 De Hossche was well aware of the
historical associations of his chosen literary form, and went out of his way
to emphasize the distance between the elegy as practised by himself and the
47
For the text, see Pontano 1948: 263; Arnaldi, Gualdo Rosa and Monti Sabia 1964: 590–2. On neo-
Latin verse translations of biblical texts (often in elegiac metre), see generally Grant 1959.
48
On De Hossche, see especially Mertz, Murphy and IJsewijn 1989: 85–92; Thill and Banderier 1999:
91–9; Sacré 1996; IJsewijn 1997a. For Jacob Vande Walle’s hendecasyllables in praise of De
Hossche’s elegies, see Mertz, Murphy and IJsewijn 1989: 94–5.
49
Deslandes 1756; [Anon.] 1795.
110 l. b. t. houghton
genre’s dissolute past. When Elegy herself is brought on to the scene, the
comparison with the Ovidian model in Amores 3.1 is immediately fore-
grounded by her appearance in the opening poem of the Jesuit’s third
book, which begins like its classical counterpart with the description of a
numinous poetic grove introduced by the words stat vetus;50 but although
Elegy still proceeds ‘with unequal step’ (inaequali . . . passu), her face now
wears the blush of modesty, her brow carries the myrtle garland unwill-
ingly, and her hair is more fragrant than she would wish (Elegiae 3.1.19–24).
Her regret for the abuses wrought on her in the past is expressed in her
repudiation of the erotic concerns of classical Latin elegy, as embodied by
the nefarious mistresses of Propertius, Ovid, Tibullus and the pseudo-
Tibullan Lygdamus (Elegiae 3.1.45–52):51
Eheu, quam magno mihi Cynthia saepe rubori est!
Vt laedat, per me Cynthia forma potens.
Nec minus hac fallax, et adhuc versuta Corinna,
Nec tantum domini prima ruina sui:
Deliaque, et Nemesis, mihique invidiosa Neaera,
Pluraque criminibus nomina clara suis.
Ars quoque, quae vatem male me feliciter usum
Perdidit. heu! plures perdidit illud opus.
Ah, what a great embarrassment Cynthia often is to me! Cynthia, a sovereign
beauty through my agency in order to cause harm. And no less deceitful than
her, and still crafty, is Corinna, the principal ruin not just of her own master;
and there’s Delia and Nemesis, and Neaera hateful to me, and many more
names famous for their transgressions; also the Ars, which disastrously ruined the
poet who made such happy use of me alas, that work has brought many to
perdition.
What kind of material, then, would De Hossche’s newly chastened Elegy
regard as a suitable expression of her resolutely wholesome character? The
poet’s first elegiac collection, Cursus humanae vitae, offers a series of moral-
izing reflections on the voyage of life, with the parallel established in the
opening lines, again in Ovidian fashion, by the repeated gnomic statement
of the proposition at the start and end of the couplet, and a call for credence
from the imagined audience: Vita mare est: res plena metu, res plena tumultu |
Vtraque. Mortales credite, Vita mare est (‘Life is a sea: each is a thing full of
fear, a thing full of turmoil. Believe me, mortals: life is a sea’, Cursus

50
De Hossche 1656: 83–6 at 83.
51
De Hossche 1656: 84; Cynthia forma potens (‘Cynthia, a sovereign beauty’, 46) quotes Propertius
2.5.28.
 Elegy 111
humanae vitae 1.1–2; cf. Ovid, Amores 1.9.1–2).52 Even further removed, it
would appear, from the usual preoccupations of the classical elegists and
their lovelorn followers is the cycle of elegies on the crucifixion, Christus
patiens, which begins provocatively with the injunction Discite quid sit
Amor, ‘Learn what Love is’ (1.1) – that is, what Love really is, as manifested
in the passion of Christ, rather than in the disreputable passions of De
Hossche’s elegiac predecessors.53 Looking back at the ancient representatives
of the tradition, it may seem astonishing how far elegy has travelled since the
days of Cynthia, Delia and Corinna – yet what could be more elegiac than
the final complaint of Christ on the cross, lamenting his abandonment by
the one dearest to him (Christus patiens 12.37–40)?54
Attollit tamen exsangues ad sidera vultus,
Vtque potest, oculis quaerit, et ore patrem.
Singultumque trahens imo de pectore: Mene
Destituis, clamat, tu quoque care pater?
He raises his pallid face to the stars, however, and so far as he can, he seeks his
father with his eyes and his speech. And drawing a sob from the depths of his
heart, he cries: Are you too forsaking me, dear father?
The flexibility of the elegiac couplet earned the genre of elegy an almost
unparalleled diffusion; it was practised wherever the composition of Latin
verse formed part of the educational curriculum, by the reluctant school-
boy no less than by future occupants of the throne of St Peter. The result
was a body of literature of extraordinary volume and variety, and for as
long as neo-Latin poetry retained its place in the literate culture of Europe
and beyond, the genre’s popularity was never diminished by fluctuations
in fashion.55 The elegy was cultivated by some of the most distinguished
authors of the age, by poets of the stature of Pontano, Ariosto, Poliziano,
Sannazaro, Buchanan, Secundus, Du Bellay and Milton; it could be used
to channel everyone from the dead Cicero to Catherine of Aragon, from St
Peter and the Magdalene to items of exotic fruit.56 Jacob Burckhardt’s
judgments on the overall character of the Renaissance are now generally

52
De Hossche 1656: 1.
53
Especially, perhaps, of Pontano, whose elegy on the cicada ends with the assertion cicadae | sors felix: o
iam discite quid sit amor (‘the lot of the cicada is happy: ah, now learn what love is’, Eridanus 1.15.15–16).
54
De Hossche 1656: 31.
55
For nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin elegy, see IJsewijn and Sacré 1998: 83–4.
56
Cicero: Eobanus Hessus, De tumultibus horum temporum querela 6 (Vredeveld 1990: 56–63); Catherine
of Aragon: Molza, Elegiae 2.8 (Scorsone and Sodano 1999: 50–7; also Perosa and Sparrow 1979: 261–4);
St Peter: De Hossche, Lacrymae S. Petri (De Hossche 1656: 51–79); Mary Magdalene: Barberini,
Poemata 161 (Barberini 1640: 285–7); fruit: Sannazaro, Elegiae 2.10 (see above).
112 l. b. t. houghton
viewed with scepticism;57 but there may perhaps be something in his
verdict that ‘it was in lyric, and more particularly in elegiac, poetry that
the poet-scholar came nearest to antiquity’, and that ‘[a]s the humanists
dealt most freely of all with the text of the Roman elegiac poets, so they felt
themselves most at home in imitating them’.58

F U R T H E R RE A D IN G
Although not all of the texts are readily available in modern editions and
translations, the student of neo Latin elegy is now much better served than in
previous years. Introductions to the genre as a whole can be found in IJsewijn
and Sacré 1990 8: 2.80 5, de Beer 2014 and Moul 2015: 45 7; the erotic side is
surveyed by Parker 2012 and Braden 2010, complemented by Houghton 2013.
Also valuable for general orientation are Fantazzi 1996 and Ludwig 1976. There are
important collections of essays in Chappuis Sandoz 2011, Cardini and Coppini
2009 and Catanzaro and Santucci 1999; collections on individual authors include
Auhagen and Schäfer 2001 (on Lotichius), Baier 2003 (on Pontano), Schäfer
2004b (on Secundus), and Kofler and Novokhatko forthcoming (on Landino),
all in the NeoLatina series. The most significant recent monograph is Pieper 2008,
which ranges considerably beyond its immediate subject (Landino’s Xandra). New
texts with translations have appeared in the I Tatti Renaissance Library, published
by Harvard University Press (see for instance Chatfield 2008 and Putnam 2009),
and in editions from other presses (e.g. Murgatroyd 2000), although more
remains to be done. The anthologies of Arnaldi et al. 1964, Laurens and
Balavoine 1975, Perosa and Sparrow 1979, Nichols 1979 and McFarlane
1980 remain useful in offering a flavour of the range of material encompassed
by neo Latin elegiac poetry.

57
On Burckhardt’s assessment of neo-Latin literature in particular, see especially Celenza 2004: 1–2,
11–13.
58
Burckhardt 1990: 172–3.
 chapter 7

Lyric
Julia Haig Gaisser

Renaissance Latin lyric is a capacious and varied genre that resists precise
definition, refusing to be limited by length, subject, or meter. It includes
long poems and short, on subjects from love to death, politics to religion,
and everything in between. It is usually written in lyric meters, but
occasionally slips over into elegiacs.1 Its poets are eclectic and flexible,
drawing on ancient poets but also on each other, moving from one mode
to another (often within the same collection), sometimes writing in
dialogue with vernacular poetry, and sometimes composing in both Latin
and the vernacular. The poets were highly mobile physically as well as
intellectually, moving from city to city and country to country, absorbing
and dispensing influence across national borders.
Their genre, like so much else in the Renaissance, begins with Francesco
Petrarca (Petrarch).2 In the years between around 1345 and 1370 Petrarch
composed a series of letters to ancient authors, one of which (Rerum
familiarium 24.10) is addressed to Horace.3 The letter is in quantitative
verse, and the choice of meter is significant: the first asclepiad, with which
Horace began and ended his three books of Odes. It begins:
Regem, te, lyrici carminis Italus
orbis quem memorat plectraque Lesbia
nerviis cui tribuit Musa sonantibus
[. . .]
te nunc dulce sequi (Fam. 24.10.1 7)

1
Lyric meters include those used in Horace’s Odes (e.g., asclepiadeans, alcaics, archilocheans,
sapphics), but also the phalaecean hendecasyllables of Catullus. But neo-Latin poets also composed
lyric poetry in elegiacs, one of the best examples being Joannes Secundus, whose lyric Basia include
several poems in elegiac couplets. See also IJsewijn and Sacré 1998: 79–99.
2
For medieval poems in quantitative lyric meters in imitation of Horace, see Friis-Jensen 2007:
294–300 with earlier bibliography. Between around 1200 and the mid fourteenth century such
imitations seem to have been rare (Friis-Jensen, 299).
3
Ludwig 1992a: 305–25 (with a full text on 359–63); Houghton 2009: 161–72. For translation see
Petrarch 1985: 336–9.

113
114 julia haig gaisser
O you, whom the Italian world celebrates
as king of lyric song, and on whom the Muse
bestowed the Lesbian lyre with sounding strings,
[. . .]
it is sweet to follow you now.
In the next 131 lines Petrarch enumerates favorite Horatian themes, touch-
ing on dozens of poems and constantly echoing, but never parroting
Horatian language. The list is punctuated with references to Petrarch’s
desire to follow Horace – over land and sea, north and south, east and
west, to the very ends of the earth.4
As early as it is, Petrarch’s lyric tribute to Horace already has two features
that would be characteristic of much Renaissance neo-Latin lyric. First,
Petrarch claims a place in the great tradition of Latin poetry. He wants to
follow Horace through the Odes not just as a reader, but as an imitator. As he
says in lines 125–6: ‘when I saw [you], my wandering mind conceived a
noble envy (invidiam . . . nobilem)’ – an urge to imitate and rival his ancient
predecessor.5 Second, his poem has close links with vernacular poetry. Many
of his Horatian echoes evoke themes that he had borrowed from the Odes
and used in his Italian lyrics, the Canzoniere.6 In celebrating Horace, then,
Petrarch is also celebrating himself. Using the lyric meter of Horace’s most
famous programmatic odes, he has written a tribute to Horace that com-
memorates his own achievement in both Italian and Latin lyric.
But Petrarch’s lyric had no immediate successors, for the idea of writing
quantitative Latin lyric poetry did not take hold until around 1450 or so. His
letter to Horace is the forerunner, not the impetus or inspiration of the mass
of neo-Latin lyric poetry that would be written all over Europe in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This lyric took many forms. In what
follows we will consider only three, looking closely at a few poems of each
type: erotic poetry in the style of Catullus, odes on the seasons, and hymns.

Catullan Poetry
Renaissance Catullan poetry straddles the boundary between epigram and
lyric, tilting sometimes in one direction, sometimes in the other. It is the

4
hec dum tu modulans me cupidum preis / duc . . . duc . . . duc . . . duc (‘while you go ahead playing these
songs, lead me in my eagerness . . . lead . . . lead . . . lead’, 41–53); Ibo pari impetu (‘I will go, matching
your step’, 57); quo te cunque moves, quicquid agis, iuvat (‘wherever you go, whatever you do, it is
pleasing’, 66); te . . . / sequens (‘following you’, 127–9); insequor (‘I follow’, 136).
5
For the interpretation of invidiam . . . nobilem, see Ludwig 1992a: 321 n. 47.
6
Friis-Jensen 2007: 299–300; McGann 2007: 307–10; Houghton 2009: 164–72.
 Lyric 115
creation of the great Neapolitan poet Giovanni Gioviano Pontano
(1429–1503), who made it a recognizable and popular genre and set it on
the course it would follow for the next two hundred and fifty years.7
Pontano arrived in Naples in 1448 as a very young man and found a
mentor and friend in Antonio Beccadelli (Panormita), author of the
scandalous Hermaphroditus, a collection of largely obscene poems modeled
on Martial and the Priapeia. He also gained access to a manuscript of
Catullus. The combination of Panormita and Martial on the one hand and
Catullus on the other was decisive. Within a year Pontano had written his
first collection of Catullan poetry: Pruritus (‘Titillations’). Two more
followed: Parthenopeus sive Amores (1457) and Hendecasyllabi sive Baiae
(completed around 1500). The collections differ in subject and tone.
Pruritus is largely obscene in the manner of Panormita; Parthenopeus
embarks on a more sophisticated program and mixes Catullan poems with
elegies and odes; the Hendecasyllabi, poems of Pontano’s old age, are
sensual but also elegiac in tone. Despite their differences, however, the
collections share some distinctive features that would be characteristic of
Pontano’s new genre.
Several of these features are exemplified in Parthenopeus 1.28, a program-
matic poem in hendecasyllables addressed to Pontano’s friend Lorenzo
Bonincontri, dedicatee of the first book of Parthenopeus.8
Uxoris nitidae beate coniunx,
cunctis coniugibus beatiorque,
quid sentis, age, de meo libello
nobis dissere. Numquid a Catullo
quemquam videris esse nequiorem,
aut qui plus habeat procacitatis,
non dico tamen elegantiorem?
Sed certe meus hic libellus unum
doctum post sequitur suum Catullum
et Calvum veteremque disciplinam.
Non multo minor est novis poetis.
Saltat versiculis canens minutis
hoc, quod non sonuere mille ab annis
musarum citharae aut Lyaei puellae. (Parthenopeus 1.28.1 14)
O happy husband of a radiant wife,
And happier than all husbands,
Tell us, please, what you think of
My little book. Surely you won’t have seen

7 8
Ludwig 1989b; Gaisser 1993: 220–8. Pontano 1948: 95.
116 julia haig gaisser
Anyone naughtier since Catullus,
Or who has more wantonness
To say nothing of being more elegant?
But surely this little book of mine
Is second to its learned Catullus alone
And Calvus and the ancient discipline.
It is not much less than the new poets.
It dances, singing in tiny verses this strain
that the Muses’ lyres and the girls of Bacchus
have not sounded for a thousand years.
‘O happy husband of a radiant wife’. This first line brings us into a
different world from that of Catullus. Bonincontri is a real husband, and
his ‘radiant wife’ is his real wife, Caecilia, whom Pontano calls ‘Cicella’ in
line 24, and whose bare-breasted erotic play with Bonincontri he describes
in the dedication poem of Parthenopeus 1 (Parth. 1.1.16–26). By celebrating
the sensual conjugal love of Bonincontri and Caecilia in his opening and
closing poems, Pontano sets a new course for Catullan poetry.9 Not all of
his lovers will be married, but their behavior is almost always presented
as highly sensual – far more sensual than anything in Catullus. Also
characteristic of Pontano is his insistence on a position in the Latin poetic
tradition – here as the first successor of Catullus, sounding ‘in tiny verses a
strain not sounded for a thousand years’. The ‘tiny verses’ are hendeca-
syllables, the signature meter of his model and of all subsequent Catullan
poetry. Pontano’s hendecasyllables are like Catullus’ but more so, for they
exaggerate Catullus’ use of assonance, repetition and diminutives, and they
delight in using long comparatives and other five- and six-syllable words at
the end of a line.10
Absent from this poem but present in many others is a theme that
would become an essential marker of Catullan poetry: a preoccupation
with Catullus’ kiss poems, 5 and 7. Usually Pontano just describes or
counts kisses.11 But in one famous and influential poem he follows
Martial 11.6 in combining Catullan kisses with the sparrow of Cat. 2–3
to produce an obscene reading of the sparrow.12 In Parthenopeus 1.5
(originally in Pruritus), he refuses to give his snow-white dove (niveam
meam columbam, 1.5.1) to boys, ‘terrible catamites’ (mali cinaedi, 1.5.4),

9
Parth. 1.28 was originally the last poem in Parth. 1. Pontano’s editor, Pietro Summonte, followed it
with several others, obscuring Pontano’s arrangement. See Ludwig 1989b: 173 n. 47.
10
E.g. beatiorque (2); nequiorem (5); procacitatis (6); elegantiorem (7). For another striking example of
the Pontanan hendecasyllable, see Parth. 1.11 and the discussion in Gaisser 2009: 181.
11 12
E.g. Parth. 1.11, 1.14, 1.15, 1.24, 1.26. Ludwig 1989b: 175–6. Gaisser 1993: 233–54.
 Lyric 117
bestowing it instead on his girl, who will embrace and kiss it.13 The dove
will play in her lap:
ut, cum te roseo ore suaviatur
rostrum purpureis premens labellis,
mellitam rapias iocosa linguam,
et tot basia totque basiabis,
donec nectarei fluant liquores. (Parthenopeus 1.5.27 31)
so that when she kisses you with rosy mouth
pressing your beak with purple lips,
you might snatch her honeyed tongue in play
and give so many kisses and kisses again
until the streams of nectar flow.

With this recasting of Martial’s interpretation of Catullus’ sparrow,

Pontano anticipated Angelo Poliziano, who was to make the same point
in his Miscellanea (1.6) forty years later. Posterity has given Poliziano all the
credit, but the Renaissance poets knew better, endlessly playing with,
expanding, and sometimes criticizing both Pontano’s kiss poems and his
obscene sparrow or dove in Catullan poems all over Europe.
A second important feature of Pontano’s Catullan poetry is the Catullan
program derived from Cat. 16, the insistence that to please its readers light
poetry must arouse them.14
qui [versiculi] tum denique habent salem ac leporem,
si sunt molliculi ac parum pudici,
et quod pruriat incitare possunt,
non dico pueris, sed his pilosis
qui duros nequeunt movere lumbos. (Cat. 16.7 11)
[Verses] only have wit and charm
if they are a little soft and not quite modest,
and can stir up sexual excitement
I don’t mean for boys, but for these hairy old men
unable to move their stiffened loins.

This idea appears in each of Pontano’s Catullan collections – in the

significantly named Pruritus, in Parthenopeus, where boys and old men
alike are to learn playful verses (Parth. 1.1.13–15), and in the Hendecasyllabi,
which promise to arouse and please old men. Later Catullan poets would
also invoke Cat. 16, but preferred to call on the lines in which he

13 14
Pontano 1948: 70–1. Gaisser 1993: 220–8.
118 julia haig gaisser
distinguished between the character of the poet and that of his poetry: ‘For
it is right for the true poet to be chaste himself, / but not necessary for his
verses to be so’ (16.5–6).
Pontano’s Catullan poetry was both imitated and debated in Italy –
especially by his friends and protegés Jacopo Sannazaro and Michele
Marullo and by the serious Carmelite monk, Johannes Baptista Spagnolo,
known as Mantuan.15 Sannazaro wrote kiss poems in the Pontanan
manner. Marullo tried to revise the Catullan program, counting sighs
rather than kisses and insisting that he would write only chaste love poetry.
Mantuan rejected the whole enterprise. Both Marullo and Mantuan
specifically rejected the poet’s excuse from Cat. 16.5–6.16
In the sixteenth century Catullan poetry moved to France, introduced and
naturalized there principally by Jean Salmon Macrin (1490–1557).17 In collec-
tions published in 1528, 1530 and 1531 Macrin approvingly cited the poet’s
excuse from Cat. 16 in his own hendecasyllables and wrote sensual love poetry
to his wife, Gelonis, demanding and celebrating kisses.18 Macrin’s poetry
influenced other French poets, who wrote Catullan poetry in both Latin and
French.19 But he also seems to have influenced the young Dutch poet,
Joannes Secundus (1511–36), whose collection, Basia (‘Kisses’, c. 1534–6),
turned out to be the most important Catullan poetry of the Renaissance.20
Secundus’ work is a cycle of nineteen poems or ‘kisses’ (Basia) on the
subject of the kisses of his girl Neaera – kisses counted, classified, demanded,
rejected and sensuously described throughout the cycle.21 The Basia, erotic
and metapoetic at the same time, draw on Catullus, Martial and the
Priapeia, as well as on the Renaissance Catullan poets in Naples and Macrin
in France; but they are also steeped in Horace’s Odes and Epodes. Their
meter is richly varied, including not only hendecasyllables and elegiacs, but
pythiambics, anacreontics, asclepiads, glyconics and aeolics.
A favorite theme is the relationship between kisses and death (both actual
death and the ‘little death’ of extreme sexual pleasure). The underlying idea

15
Gaisser 1993: 245–8; Lamers 2009. The most relevant poems are Sannazaro Ep. 1.6; Marullo Ep. 1.62
and 3.31; Mantuan: Contra poetas impudice scribentes carmen.
16
Marullo: et quae non facimus dicere facta pudet (‘and I am ashamed to speak of things I do not do’,
Ep. 1.62.22). Mantuan: vita decet sacros et pagina casta poetas (‘a chaste life and a chaste page befits
holy poets’, Contra poetas, 19).
17
McFarlane 1959–1960, esp. 1959: 67–84; Ford 1993.
18
He recast Cat. 16.5–8 in a program poem printed in 1528: 1.9–14; see Gaisser 1993: 229. Catullan
poems by Macrin are quoted by Morrison 1955: 381–3; McFarlane 1959: 75, 79–81 and Ford 1993:
119–22.
19 20
Ford 1993: 126–30. Ford 1993.
21
Secundus 1969: K7r–M2r; text and translation in Nichols 1979: 486–515. The cycle is analyzed by
Schoolfield 1980: 101–17; Price 1996: 55–73; Schäfer 2004b.
 Lyric 119
is that of the soul kiss – that the lovers as they kiss exchange the spirit or
breath of life.22 Such kisses can make them immortal, bring them to the
brink of death, or move them in turn between life and death.
In Basium 2 Secundus wishes that he and Neaera could be entwined as
closely as the vine and elm, embracing in an eternal kiss (perenne basium,
2.8). Then they would be joined in death, carried in a single boat ‘to the
pale house of Dis’ (ad pallidam Ditis domum, 2.14), imagined as an Elysium
for lovers. The essential intertext is Horace, Epode 15, also in pythiambics
and addressed to a Neaera. Horace’s Neaera swore an oath of eternal
mutuus amor, clinging ‘more tightly than a lofty oak is gripped by ivy’
(artius atque hedera procera adstringitur ilex, Epod. 15.5). But her oath was
false. The intertext colors our vision of Secundus’ Neaera from the outset:
perhaps she will be unfaithful too. In Basium 4 the kisses are even more
powerful than in Basium 2, for now they are not just the breath of life but
the food of immortality (nectar, 4.1), bringing the lover not to Elysium
but to Olympus itself (4.8–10).
Basium 16 is a Horatian ode blending Catullan and Horatian themes.23
The meter is the fourth asclepiad. It too opens with a request for kisses:
Latonae niveo sidere blandior,
Et stella Veneris pulchrior aurea,
Da mi basia centum,
Da tot basia, quot dedit
Vati multivolo Lesbia, quot tulit. (Basium 16.1 5)
You, more alluring than Latona’s snow white moon
And more beautiful than the golden star of Venus,
Give me a hundred kisses,
Give as many kisses as Lesbia gave
To the poet who wanted many, give as many as she got.
The kissing lovers will be like amorous doves in springtime, and they will
alternately swoon and revive each other with animating kisses (16.21–40).
But, as in Horace, spring is followed by old age and death; the poem closes
with a carpe diem motif (16.41–4).
Secundus, short-lived as he was (he died at 25), claimed immortality
for his poetry. At the end of Basium 1, he says that he will sing the
praises of the kisses ‘as long as . . . Love speaks the soft words of the
Romans’ (dum . . . / mollia Romulidum verba loquetur Amor, 1.24, 26).

22
Perella 1969: 158–243. Before Secundus the soul kiss appears in (among others) Sannazaro, Ep. 1.6;
Marullo, Ep. 2.4; Macrin, Carminum liber secundus 11.
23
Gaisser 1993: 250–4.
120 julia haig gaisser
Latin poets all over Europe fulfilled his prediction, but the influence of
the Basia extended to vernacular poets as well, especially in France.24 To
cite a single example, the great French poet Pierre Ronsard (1524–85)
closely imitated several of the Basia in his own poems – perhaps most
notably in Chanson iii (1578), which virtually translates Basium 2: Plus
estroit que la vigne à l’ormeau se marie (‘More tightly than the vine
enclasps the elm’).25

Odes on the Seasons

In the hundred years or so after Petrarch’s verse letter to Horace, only a
handful of Renaissance poets wrote in lyric meters. Cristoforo Landino
(1424–98) had finished several poems in sapphics by 1443.26 Pontano’s
Parthenopeus Book 1 (completed around 1457) includes sapphics and
asclepiads.27 In 1455 or 1456 Francesco Filelfo (1398–1481) completed a
collection of fifty odes using all of Horace’s meters.28 But neither Landino
nor Pontano seems to have continued with lyric in the 1460s and 1470s,
and Filelfo’s very long, largely autobiographical odes did not inspire
imitation. In the 1480s, however, odes began to come into their own,
and soon they were being written everywhere in Europe.
Horace was always the principal ancient model. Poets also looked to
Pindar, particularly in France, but their Pindaric conceptions were often
colored by their reading of Horace.29 Renaissance Latin odes are both like
and unlike their ancient models. They frequently use the same themes, but
like to play with them differently, using a classical intertext as an element
contributing to the meaning of their own work. They are often tied very
closely to the poet’s life, relating details of his travels, finances, illnesses and
family. Most important, they reflect a different world from that of their
ancient counterparts – different in customs, institutions, politics and above
all religion.
Horace’s famous spring poems (Carm. 1.4 and 4.7) were favorites with
the Renaissance poets. In both odes Horace associates spring with life and
youth, which will irrevocably move toward the winter of old age and death.

24
Price 1996: 55–6; Ellinger 1899.
25
Ronsard 1938: i, 294–6. Chanson iii is from the first book of Ronsard’s Sonnets pour Hélène (1578).
For other examples see Chamard 1946.
26
Xandra 1.22, 25, 27, 30. For the date, see Ludwig 1989b: 170–1.
27
Sapphics: Parthenopeus 1.7, 12. Asclepiads: Parthenopeus 1.29. Parthenopeus 1 was completed in 1457;
Ludwig 1989b: 177. But Parth. 1.29 can be dated around 1449; Ludwig 1989b: 173 n. 47.
28 29
Filelfo 2009: xiii. Revard 2009a: 15.
 Lyric 121
The seasons come around again, as he says in Carm. 4.7, but our life is
linear and our death final. The message is the familiar carpe diem. These
ideas were old even in Horace’s time (compare Catullus 5.4–6), but they
are also true and poignant, and they provided the Renaissance poets, as
they had Catullus and Horace before them, with a flexible framework for
important poems.
In the 1480s Michele Marullo (1453–1500) addressed a spring poem
(Ep. 1.63, in sapphics) to his fellow Greek exile, Manilius Rhallus,
calling his attention to the happy celebration of May Day.30 Flowers
decorate the houses, flourishing young men mingle with girls crowned
with garlands, old and young alike glow with happiness (omnis aetas /
laeta renidet, 7–8). Cupid is everywhere, linking the young people in
dances, making the girls beautiful, lighting the fires of love. Now comes
the carpe diem (21–32), but without the usual reminder of death. Rhallus
is not bidden to look ahead to a dark future, but rather urged to enjoy
this day.
Mitte vaesanos, bone Rhalle, questus:
Iam sat indultum patriae ruinae est.
Nunc vocat lusus
[. . .]
Quid dies omnis miseri querendo
Perdimus dati breve tempus aevi? (Ep. 1.63.21 3, 25 6)
Put aside frenzied laments, good Rhallus.
Enough tears have been shed for the ruin of our homeland.
Now play calls us
[. . .]
Why miserable all our days do we waste
In regret the short time of life given us?
After an Horatian call for wine and the banishing of grief the ode ends:
Tota nimirum Genio mihique / Fulserit haec lux! (‘Surely for my Genius and
me / this whole day will have shone bright!’, 31–2).
This poem, very different from Horace in several ways, still uses his
basic structure: a joyous evocation of spring, followed by a sharp turn to
serious reflection. Marullo’s focus is not on a season, but on a single day,
May day (Maias . . . Kalendas, 5; haec lux, 32), seen as a brief respite from
continuing sorrow (cf. dies omnis, 25).

30
Marullo 1951: 28–9; Arnaldi, Gualdo Rosa and Monti Sabia 1964: 952–5. Translated in Nichols 1979:
228–31; Marullo 2012: 50–3; Kidwell 1989: 91–2. Briefly discussed in Nichols 1997: 163; McGann
1995: 332–4. Rhallus is also the addressee of Ep. 3.47.
122 julia haig gaisser
Angelo Poliziano (1454–94) addressed Ode 6 to his students at the
beginning of a course of lectures in 1487.31 The meter is the third asclepiad.
Iam cornu gravidus praecipitem parat
Afflatus subitis frigoribus fugam
Autumnus pater, et deciduas sinu
Frondes excipit arborum. (Ode 6.1 4)
Now weighed down by his cornucopia,
Father Autumn prepares his headlong flight,
Buffeted by sudden cold; and he gathers up
Fallen leaves of the trees in the fold of his garment.
The farmers, half-sober, celebrate autumn and the end of their labors with
rustic revels (5–8), but the turning of the year calls the students and their
teacher back ‘under the yoke of the Muses’ (sub iugo Musarum, 9–10) to
‘seize the fleeting day’ (carpamus volucrem diem, 12) in study.
In the next stanza the poet leads his students to Parnassus.
I mecum, docilis turba, biverticis
Parnassi rapidis per iuga passibus,
Expers quo senii nos vocat et rogi
Consors gloria coelitum. (Ode 6.13 16)
Go with me, docile throng, on swift foot
Through the ridges of twin peaked Parnassus,
Where glory calls us, who is immune to old age and death,
Sharing the lot of the gods.
The language here is ecstatic, almost Bacchic; words like turba (‘throng’
and rapidis . . . passibus (‘swift steps’) suggest mad revels, and the rare
biverticis (twin-peaked) adds an exotic note.32 But the mountain is Parnas-
sus, not Cithaeron, and it is not Bacchus who calls but rather glory itself.
Ode 6 is playful and serious at the same time. It includes the familiar
Horatian elements: the seasons, the revolving year, carpe diem, old age and
death; but Poliziano replaces spring with autumn, makes witty play with
carpe diem (seize the shortening day – for study) and displaces old age and
death with a call to pursue the immortality of literary glory. The poem is a
perfect captatio benevolentiae for his lectures, and Horace was familiar
enough by now that Poliziano could count on his students to appreciate

31
Poliziano 1867: 265–6; Arnaldi, Gualdo Rosa and Monti Sabia 1964: 1048–9. Translated in Nichols
1979: 276–7.
32
Bivertex occurs only here and in Statius’ Thebaid 1.628 (also in the collocation biverticis . . . / Parnasi,
628–9).
 Lyric 123
it. He could also count on them to notice that he has touched on a central
tenet of his poetics in the last two stanzas (13–20): that poetry requires both
divinely inspired poetic frenzy (furor poeticus) and laborious effort.33
Conrad Celtis (1459–1508), justly called the ‘German Horace’, was restless
and peripatetic, studying and teaching in universities all over Germany,
traveling to Italy, teaching in Poland and finally occupying a chair at the
University of Vienna.34 Among his favorite themes were his own place in the
poetic tradition and the movement of intellectual accomplishment from
Greece to Rome to Germany. In his most famous poem, the ‘Apollo ode’
(Ode 4.5), Celtis calls Apollo to leave Italy for Germany as he had once left
Greece for Rome.35 In Epode 12 (‘To the German Poets’) he aspires to be
recognized as the German successor of Horace: Inter Germanos mea, sic rogo,
carmina durent, / ut Italis Horatius sub finibus36 (‘Among the Germans, I pray,
may my songs be as lasting / as Horace in the Italian lands’, Epode 12.17–18).
Celtis modeled the structure of his collections on Horace: four books of Odes,
a book of seventeen Epodes and a Carmen Saeculare. But he also used many of
Horace’s themes and individual poems, including Carm. 1.4 and 4.7.
In the 1490s, still in his forties, he composed a winter poem, ‘On the
Threshold of His Old Age’ (Ad senectutem suam, Ode 4.1), which draws on
both of Horace’s spring poems.37 The ode concerns the poet himself, for
unlike poems we have seen by Horace, Marullo and Poliziano, it lacks an
addressee.
Iam mihi tristis hiems Boreasque rigentibus procellis
incana menta sparserant pruinis,
et modo testa mihi glabrescit perditis capillis,
squalent ut arbores comis solutis,
quas Capricornus atrox et Aquarius algido rigore
denudat et suo spoliat decore. (Ode 4.1.1 6)
Already gloomy winter and Boreas with freezing storms
had sprinkled my hoary chin with frost,
and now my pate grows bald from loss of hair,
as trees stand desolate, leaves fallen,
when savage Capricorn and Aquarius with frigid cold
denude and despoil them of their beauty.

33
For furor poeticus see Coppini 1998. Poliziano expressed the concept, drawn from Plato’s Ion by way
of Landino and Ficino, in Nutricia, completed in October 1486, a year before Ode vi. See especially
Nutricia 25–33, 139–45, 188–98.
34 35
Spitz 1957; Nichols 1979: 693–5; Schäfer 1976: 1–38. Celtis 2012: 302–5.
36
Celtis 2012: 340–3; translated in Nichols 1979: 460–1.
37
Celtis 2012: 290–1. Text and discussion in Schäfer 1976: 31–2.
124 julia haig gaisser
Celtis evokes Horace far more closely than Marullo and Poliziano had done.
His meter is the third archilochean, used by Horace only in Carm. 1.4; and
his first line neatly recalls Horace’s Solvitur acris hiems grata vice veris et
Favoni (‘harsh winter loosens its grip with the welcome succession of spring
and Favonius’, Carm. 1.4.1). Celtis’ tristis hiems echoes Horace’s acris hiems
in the same position in the line; his Boreas picks up and reverses Horace’s
Favonius (Zephyr, the west wind); the phrase rigentibus procellis (‘freezing
storms’) suggests the tight grip of winter, which was melted and relaxed in
Horace. But the winter in Celtis is internal – the winter of his own life,
manifested in the physical changes in his body: his beard sprinkled with
frost, his head bereft of hair. Celtis has reached the last of his seasons, and we
are not surprised to find no carpe diem: his time is already spent.
Nature’s seasons, by contrast, come round again (7–10). Spring’s
warmth restores the leaves; Venus ensures that earth will be filled with
‘reborn progeny’ (prole . . . renata, 10). The springtime renewal prepares us
for the familiar opposition between cyclical nature and finite human life,
the theme of Horace Carm. 4.7.13–16. Here is Celtis:
Ast ubi pigra semel nostris venit artubus senectus
et mors supremo nos locat feretro,
imperiosa trahit Proserpina sub suum cubile,
quod ferreis cum vectibus seravit. (Ode 4.1.11 14)
But when slow old age comes on our limbs
and death places us on the funeral bier,
imperious Proserpina drags us down to her chamber,
which she has bolted shut with iron bars.

The lines also evoke Carm. 1.4, for Celtis’ ‘bolted chamber of Proserpina’
(13–14), like Horace’s ‘meagre house of Pluto’ (domus exilis Plutonia, Carm.
1.4.17), describes our final destination in the underworld. In Horace the
destination suggests the constraint and insubstantiality of death in contrast
with the expansive pleasures of spring and life. Celtis contrasts the sterile
bedchamber of Proserpina with Venus and the regenerative powers of
spring. The poem ends with a counterpart to the idea in Horace Carm.
4.7 that no one, regardless of character or powerful friends, can come back
from death. Celtis, characteristically, replaces Horace’s classical examples
(Torquatus, Hippolytus and Pirithoos) with representatives of the four
regions of Germany. No one will awake from the sleep of death, he says: sit
quamvis Rheni dominus vel Vistulae colonus, / Istri vel Arctoi sinus tyrannus
(‘although he be a lord on the Rhine or a settler on the Vistula, / Or a ruler
on the Danube or on the North Sea’, Ode 4.1.17–18).
 Lyric 125
George Buchanan (1506–82) was born in Scotland and educated in France;
he lived and worked in both countries, first teaching in French universities and
later serving the Stuarts at the Scottish court.38 He also spent several years
teaching in Portugal, where his anti-clerical views got him arrested and briefly
imprisoned by the Inquisition. He later converted to Protestantism. Buchanan
wrote poetry in many styles, from satiric to epithalamial, erotic to religious;
but he is perhaps best known for his paraphrases of the psalms (largely written
during his Portuguese imprisonment).39 In the 1550s he composed a spring
poem in alcaic strophes, Calendae Maiae (Miscellaneorum liber 11).40
Its opening could almost be that of any spring poem – except for the
appearance of sacer (‘sacred’) twice in the first line.
Salvete sacris deliciis sacrae
Maiae Calendae, laetitiae et mero
ludisque dicatae iocisque
et teneris Charitum choreis. (Misc. 11.1 4)
Hail May Day, sacred to sacred delights
and devoted to happiness and wine
and to games and jests
and to the Graces’ delicate dances.
As usual, spring’s beauty comes back in an eternal cycle (perpetua vice, 6)
and the bloom of youth hastens to old age (5–8). But now the poem turns,
for Buchanan’s theme is not carpe diem or old age and death, but the
qualities of spring itself. The warmth and breezes of this spring – this single
May Day – are like those of another time and place: the unbroken spring
of the Golden Age when the world was new. There is ‘such a steady course
through all the years’ (talis per omnes continuus tenor / annos, 13–14); ‘the
endless warmth of a favoring breeze lies on on the Isles of the Blessed’ (talis
beatis incubat insulis / felicis aurae perpetuus tepor, 17–18); ‘such a breath
whispers with a soft murmur through the grove of the silent dead’ (talis
silentum per tacitum nemus / levi susurrat murmure spiritus, 21–2). Perhaps
these features will even have counterparts in the future (25–8). The ode
ends by circling back to the salutation of May Day, ‘glory of a fleeting age’
(fugacis gloria saeculi, 29), a brief reminder of more enduring, and eternal,
things: et specimen venientis aevi (‘and token of the age to come’, Misc.
11.32).

38 39
Ford 1982: 1–11. Green 2011. See also Green 2000, 2009a, 2009b.
40
For text and translation, see Ford 1982: 152–3; Nichols 1979: 482–5. For the date, see McFarlane
1981: 114.
126 julia haig gaisser

Hymns
Renaissance Latin hymns are diverse. They often celebrate pagan gods
and powers of nature as well as Christ and the saints; sometimes (but
not always) their pagan themes have Christian overtones. They are
written in every lyric meter, but also in hexameters and elegiacs. They
are most diverse, however, in their models, for their available sources
include not only the Bible and classical and Renaissance Latin poetry,
but also Greek poetry (particularly Pindar and the Hymns of
Callimachus), Orphic hymns, early Christian poetry and the ideas of
Neo-Platonism. Some poets prefer simple piety to intertextual compli-
cation, while others draw freely from disparate sources, producing
hymns that are rich and deeply layered, but sometimes difficult to
interpret.
Michele Marullo is such a poet. In 1497 he published Hymni natur-
ales, four books of hymns addressed to ancient gods, to parts of the
universe like the sky and the sea and to eternity itself. Among the most
interesting is the hymn to Bacchus (Hymn 1.6).41 The poem is in
galliambics, a rushing, furious rhythm well suited to the orgiastic
worship of Bacchus. It is the meter of Cat. 63, in which Catullus
described the religious frenzy of Cybele’s devotee Attis; and Marullo
was the first Renaissance poet to use it.42 Marullo uses Catullus’ meter
for atmosphere, and he draws on Horace Carm. 2.19 and 3.25 to evoke
the Bacchic enthusiasm of the poet, and on Ovid (Met. 4) for Bacchus’
punishment of his enemies. He also uses expressions from Callimachus’
Hymn to Demeter and the language of several Orphic hymns, and
alludes to the thought of the Florentine Neo-Platonist Marsilio
Ficino.43
There is much disagreement about the interpretation of this rich inter-
textual brew.44 But for now, let us follow the poem itself. It opens with a
cry to the Muses:
Agedum, canite patrem, Thespiades, mihi Bromium,
subolem igneam Iovis, quem peperit bona Semele
puerum coma praesignem et radiantibus oculis. (Hymn i.6.1 3)

41
Marullo 1951: 115–16. Text with English translation in Marullo 2012: 212–17; commentaries by
Coppini 1995 and Chomarat 1995.
42
He would not be the last. See Campbell 1960.
43
Coppini 1995: 191. For the importance of Ficino see Ludwig 1992b: 54–9. For a detailed list of
borrowings, see Ford 1985: 482 n. 16.
44
For a summary of views see Coppini 1995: 191.
 Lyric 127
Come, hymn father Bromius for me, Thespian Muses,
the fiery child of Jupiter whom good Semele bore,
the boy conspicuous for his hair and his glowing eyes.
At once the poet is gripped by Bacchic madness, his heart shaken by the
god (4–5). ‘Give me cymbals and horns!’ he cries, and goes on to picture
himself at the head of a train of Bacchic devotees. The verbs are all
subjunctive: ‘let snaky ribbons bind (cingant) my hair (7)’; ‘let a thousand
Maenads howl (ululent, 10)’; ‘let me lead the way (praecedam, 15)’. This last
idea leads up to the turning point of the poem, where it is revealed that the
sacred initiation required for the Bacchic mysteries is a poetic initiation, in
the Castalian spring sacred to Apollo and the Muses (sacra Castalidos vada
vitreae, ‘the sacred waters of the clear Castalian spring’, Hymn 1.6.18).
Initiation into the mysteries of poetry, then, is necessary before one can
see the god.45
The poet achieves this initiation, for already he can hear and see the
Bacchic rites. The wish of the first section (1–18) has become a reality, as
the indicative verbs attest: the ground resounds (reboant, 19) under the feet
of the Maenads; a cloud of dust hides the midday sun (negat medium . . .
diem, 20); the beasts flee (fugiunt, 22); birds drop from the sky (regio
volucres nec sustinet aetheria suas, 23).
Only now – in the full flush of Bacchic enthusiasm – does the poet
begin his hymn.46 He begins by invoking the god by all his titles (24–9)
and moves into an account of his accomplishments. The account falls into
two sections. The first (30–8) details Bacchus’ punishments of his enemies.
The second (39–57), written in the Du Stil of ancient hymns, describes his
power over nature and his invention of civilization.47 The passage opens:
Tu, sancte, flectis amnes truculentaque maria (‘You, holy one, divert rivers
and savage seas’, Hymn 1.6.39). It ends with a grande finale, a dozen
tu’s later:
Per te remota coeli procul ardua colimus,
nimio diffusi praecordia nectare gravia,
tu das deorum sanctis accumbere dapibus. (Hymn 1.6.55 7)
Through you we inhabit the far removed heights of heaven,
Our heavy hearts made light by a great wealth of nectar.
You allow us to recline at the holy feasts of the gods.

45
Coppini 1995: ad loc.
46
Cf. Chomarat 1995: 70: ‘Commence ici une sorte d’hymne dans l’hymne’.
47
For the Du Stil, or repeated second-person address, as characteristic of ancient hymns, see Norden
1913: 143–66.
128 julia haig gaisser
The hymn concludes (58–60) with a salutation (Salve, benigne lychnita,
deum et pater hominum, ‘Hail benignant source of life, father of gods and
men’, 58) and a prayer that the god may favor his worshipers.48
We still do not know exactly what Bacchus represents. But in his
worship the poet finds ecstatic connection with a god who grants
immortality (nectar is the food of the gods) and transports his worshipers
to divine feasts in heaven. Marullo leaves his readers to draw their own
conclusions.
Marcantonio Flaminio (1498–1550) is equally reticent in his ‘Hymn to
Aurora’ (in sapphics, printed in 1529).49 As a young man Flaminio emu-
lated Marullo (even writing his own hymn to Bacchus in galliambics) and
produced Catullan poetry and secular odes; but around 1530 he turned to
Christian themes. His later work includes devotional poetry and para-
phrases of the psalms.50 The hymn begins:
Ecce ab extremo veniens Eoo
roscidas Aurora refert quadrigas
et sinu lucem roseo nitentem
candida portat. (Hymnus in Auroram, 1 4)
Look! coming from the distant East
Aurora brings back her dewy chariot,
and on her rosy bosom, radiant, she bears
the shining light.
Dawn banishes darkness and bad dreams, and the poet hails her (bona diva
salve, 10), wishing that the breeze might bring her his praise and prayers
(17–20). Dawn keeps us from lying ‘buried in eternal night’ (aeterna . . .
sepulti / nocte, 29–30) and calls eager men to the tasks of the day. Only
the lover is reluctant, blaming dawn for tearing him from his mistress’
embrace (41–4) – a brief nod to the aubade that Flaminio uses to
contrast with the expression of his own devotion to the light in the final
stanza: ipse amet noctis latebras dolosae, / me iuvet semper bona lux (‘Let him
love the hiding places of treacherous night; / may the good light
always please me’, 45–6).
Flaminio’s hymn allows but does not demand a Christian reading.
There can be no doubt, however, about the Christian message of a poem
also on night and light published in 1537 by his near contemporary Jean

48
For verse 58 I have used Fantazzi’s translation (Marullo 2012: 217).
49
Text in Perosa and Sparrow 1979: 279–81; text and translation in Nichols 1979: 418–21; Maddison
1965: 57–9.
50
For Flaminio’s biography, see Nichols 1979: 691–2; Maddison 1965.
 Lyric 129
Salmon Macrin (1490–1557). The hymn, Ad Dominum Christum ante
somnum (‘To Christ our Lord before sleep’), opens by invoking Christ as
the bringer of light.51 (The meter is alcaic strophe.)
Spes christe mundi luxque fidelium,
Titane fulgens purius igneo,
Qui clarus emergens ab Indo
Flectit equos pelago aurifraenes,
Caliginosas tu tenebras tui
Splendore vultus laetifico fugas
Noctemque peccati profundam
Discutis atque animos serenas. (Hymn 1.31.1 8)
Christ, hope of the world and light of the faithful,
Shining more brightly than the fiery Titan [Sun]
Who emerges gleaming from the Indian Ocean
And turns his horses with golden reins to the sea,
You put to flight the dark shadows
With the joyful radiance of your countenance
And dispel the deep night of sin
And lighten our hearts.
The poet beseeches Christ’s protection during the night against the
harmful clouds and hidden assaults of demons (daemonum . . . / . . .
noxia nubila, / caecosque insultos, 9–11) and asks that the body might
rise rested by sleep for the morning’s duties (9–20). He closes with the
prayer that even in sleep the spirit might keep watch for Christ’s
coming – which the poem’s imagery has prepared us to associate with
the brilliance of his light.

Afterword
This short article has omitted far more of the rich range and variety of
Renaissance lyric than it has included. Nothing has been said of laments,
praise of great men, poems of friendship or about politics and war, psalm
paraphrases, statements of poetics or Pindaric odes. The brief sampling
offered here is intended simply as an invitation to explore this vast and
largely uncharted continent of poetry.

51
Text and French translation in Macrin 2010: 364–5. For parallels with Prudentius, Cathemerinon 1,
2 and 6, see Guillet-Laburthe in Macrin 2010: 438–9.
130 julia haig gaisser

F U R T H E R RE A D IN G
Renaissance lyrics are included in several anthologies, notably Nichols 1979,
Perosa and Sparrow 1979 and Laurens 1975. Arnaldi et al. 1964, is excellent for
fifteenth century Latin poets in Italy; it includes introductory essays, Italian
translations and brief commentary. For the origins of Catullan poetry Ludwig
1989b and Gaisser 1993. For texts of Pontano’s Parthenopeus and Hendecasyllabi,
see Pontano 1948. For Hendecasyllabi alone: Pontano 2006, with translation. For
the stylistic aspects of Pontano’s hendecasyllables, see Ludwig 1989: 175 and
Schmidt 2003. There is an extensive discussion of Pontano and Catullus in
Gaisser 1993; see also the articles in Baier 2003. For Catullan poetry in France
the following are essential: Morrison 1955, 1956, 1963; McFarlane 1959 60; Ford
1993. Macrin’s odes have been edited by G. Soubeille: Macrin 1998. Schoolfield
1980 and Price 1996 both provide excellent short introductions to Joannes
Secundus; Ellinger 1899 includes many Latin imitations of the Basia. Ginsberg
1986 discusses some interactions between Latin and French Catullan poetry.
For odes Maddison 1960, though dated, still has some useful information. Revard
2001 and 2009a discusses Pindaric odes. Both scholars treat vernacular as well as
Latin poetry. For editions and translations of Landino, see Landino 1939 and (with
translation) Landino 2008. Maïer 1966 discusses Poliziano as poet and philologist.
Coppini 1998 is excellent on Poliziano’s poetry; there are other important papers
in the same volume. Schäfer 1976 is an essential starting point for Conrad Celtis
and other German Horatian poets. Celtis 2012, ed. Schäfer, is a modern edition
with German translation. Essays on Celtis’ various works are collected in
Auhagen, Lefèvre and Schäfer 2000. For Buchanan’s Psalm paraphrases, see
Green 2000, 2009a, 2009b; for text, translation and commentary, see Green 2011.
There is a large bibliography on Marullo’s Hymni naturales. The commentaries of
Coppini 1995 and Chomarat 1995 include translations, commentary and
bibliography. For Macrin, see two recent editions, both with translation and
commentary: Macrin 1998 for the odes, and Macrin 2010 for the hymns of 1537.
 chapter 8

Verse Letters
Gesine Manuwald

Introduction
In everyday life letters have a mainly practical function as written messages
from one person (or group of people) to another, set down in a tangible
medium, physically conveyed from sender(s) to recipient(s), who are
separated from each other, and overtly addressed from sender(s) to recipi-
ent(s) by conventional formulae of salutations at the beginning and the
end.1 Already in antiquity letters were identified as a convenient and
versatile framework that could be exploited beyond simple communi-
cation with an addressee: this gave rise to the publication of letters, either
individually or as collections, when they become directed towards a
secondary audience besides the ostensible primary addressee and lose the
characteristics of their physical appearance. The ‘letter’ thus develops into a
literary genre; it stays connected to its original form and role in that
characteristic features, such as typical formulae and topics, are maintained
or adapted playfully. The letter moves a further step away from its most
straightforward use when it is written in verse and/or engages with ficti-
tious addressees.
The writing of letters, both ‘real’ and more literary ones, has continued
from the Greek and Roman classical periods through late antiquity and
the Middle Ages, when there was a flourishing culture demonstrated
by numerous works called Ars dictaminis,2 into early modern times and
1
On the genre of ‘letter’, with reference to antiquity, see e.g. Sykutris 1931; Thraede 1970; Reed 1997;
Trapp 2003: 3–34; Edwards 2005; Gibson and Morrison 2007; Ebbeler 2010. On the problems of
defining ‘genre’ see e.g. Depew and Obbink 2000. No meaningful distinction between the terms
‘letter’ and ‘epistle’ is intended here.
2
For an overview of the characteristics and the evolution of such works see Rockinger 1863; Camargo
1991 (with bibliography); for an overview of texts (with bibliography and some discussion) see
Worstbrock, Klaes and Lütten 1992; on the evolution from the ars dictaminis to humanist letter-
writing see Henderson 1983b; on neo-Latin letter-writing manuals see De Landtsheer 2014c; on
letter-writing manuals see Poster and Mitchell 2007; Chartier, Boureu and Dauphin 1997; Burton
2007.

131
132 gesine manuwald
beyond. After Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch, 1304–74) discovered Cicero’s
Epistulae ad Atticum (‘Letters to Atticus’) in 1345 (cf. Petr. Fam. 24.2–4)
and Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406) found the Epistulae ad familiares
(‘Epistles to Friends’) in 1392, the composition and collection of letters
received a new impetus. These findings prompted Petrarch’s own Fami-
liarum rerum libri (‘Books of Familiar Matters’, twenty-four books of letters
in prose), though Petrarch also produced sixty-five letters in verse (in three
books). What had an impact on writers of neo-Latin epistles were primar-
ily collections of literary letters, such as those of Cicero, Seneca and Pliny
the Younger in prose and of Horace and Ovid as well as the late-antique
writers Claudian, Ausonius and Paulinus Nolanus in verse.3 The recourse
to such precedents means that most surviving early modern letters are
literary letters, shaped according to classical literary models and rhetorical
theory. Neo-Latin (verse) epistles therefore seem to have developed out of
a need for communication alongside the influential paradigm of models
from classical antiquity, particularly Latin ones, since there are no
examples of Greek collections of verse letters.
As a result there are a vast number of published letters from the early
modern period, both in Latin and in the European vernaculars.4 Since the
majority are in prose (see Chapter 15), modern anthologies tend to focus
on prose letters, letters in the vernacular or both.5 The subgenre of neo-
Latin metrical or verse epistles has attracted less attention. IJsewijn and
Sacré, who provide a brief overview, state: ‘To the best of our knowledge
no comprehensive study of the neo-Latin metrical epistles exists except for
the subgenre of the so-called heroical letters (Heroides), an off-spring of
Ovid’s letters purportedly sent by famous mythical women and men to
their absent or unfaithful lovers.’6
In view of the difficulties involved, this brief chapter does not set out to
remedy the situation entirely and to provide a comprehensive survey of early
modern verse epistles in Latin.7 Instead, it seeks to present an overview of

3
For the distinction see e.g. Ebbeler 2010: 464.
4
For a brief summary see Papy 2015; for an overview (with catalogue) see Clough 1976. On the
different kinds of writing letters and writing about them in the Renaissance see Guillén 1986: 71–3.
For ‘Some Sources for Early Modern Letters’ see http://warburg.sas.ac.uk/research/completed-
research-projects/scaliger/sources-early-modern-letters/.
5
E.g. Clements and Levant 1976; Blok 1985.
6
IJsewijn and Sacré 1998: 77. Similar comments are found in Hamill 1981: 288; Guillén 1986: 70 and
Williamson 2001: 77 and 79. For a brief overview of poetic epistles see now Porter 2014a; of elegiac
letters see De Beer 2014: 390–2.
7
On various aspects of verse epistles in the early modern period (in the vernaculars) see e.g. Motsch
1974; Williamson 2001; Overton 2007.
 Verse Letters 133
the main types of neo-Latin verse epistles (in so far as these can be distin-
guished), along with the classical basis from which they have developed, and
show their characteristics by a selection of instructive examples.

A Tentative Description of the Genre

One reason for the lack of a comprehensive study may be the generic
complexity of the letter and of the verse epistle in particular.8 This
question is not a recent problem: discussion about generic issues goes back
at least to 1714, when Ambrose Philips (1674–1749) offered what he
claimed to be the first printed discussion in English of the epistle as a
literary form: in that year Philips published an article in the Spectator
(vol. 15, no. 618 (Wednesday, 10 November 1714), p. 222) on what he called
‘the epistolary way of writing in verse’. Philips distinguished between verse
epistles in the Ovidian and Horatian moulds, and the differences in
outlook and meter (hexameter / elegiac distich) of these two ancient
collections are reflected in the neo-Latin genre. At the same time there is
no fixed context for neo-Latin verse epistles: they can appear as individual
pieces, as small groups in collections of miscellaneous poetry, as books of
epistles,9 as dedicatory or introductory pieces or as elements in epistolary
narratives. Thus, in early modern literature, as in antiquity, distinctions
between metrical epistles and other short narrative poetry, especially elegy
(due to Ovid’s example) and satire (due to Horace’s example), are not
always clear-cut.10 Verse epistles maintain the idea of communication to a
distant addressee and of being pieces of writing, though all the key features
of letters, such as typical greeting and closing formulae or common topics,
do not appear in every case or may be employed in allusive form.

Verse Epistles and Other Literary Genres

Coluccio Salutati, one of the earliest neo-Latin letter writers, mainly
produced letters in prose,11 but in one epistle (1.2; 25 January 1361?),
addressed to Tancredi de’ Vergiolesi, verse and prose are mixed:
Optat amicus avens, statum quia nescit amici,
Certior esse: precor michi quod tua pagina monstret

8
On the problems of defining ‘verse epistle’ see also Guillén 1986; Williamson 2001: 76–80; Overton
2007: 1–31. For a brief overview of typical epistolary features see Trapp 2003: 34–42.
9
On the genre of the epistle book in ancient Rome see Wulfram 2008.
10 11
See also chapters 16 and 9. Latin text in Novati 1891.
134 gesine manuwald
Qualis in urbe manes; modus inde feratur amanti,
Kare comes; qualem tibi dat fortuna salutem.
Sanus ego, dum sanus ades: tibi sorte benigna
Is faveat qui corda dedit connectere nodo
Equali, et faciem nostram tibi sepe ministret
Atque videre tuum, quem fers, puto, pectore, fratrem.
Ista momento pertingere licuit vestre prudentie. parcite, queso, rudi: hec
sumite leta manu, sique post aliquid aviditas rescribentis poscat, secure
precipite: vestris nempe iussibus obsequar.
A friend longs keenly for information, since he does not know the situation of his
friend: I pray for a note from you to show me how you are, while you stay on in
town; my state shall then depend, loving you as I do, dear companion, on what
well being fortune grants to you. I am healthy, as long as you are here and healthy:
he who has allowed hearts to be bound with equal knots should favour you with
good fortune and often arrange for you to see my face and your brother, whom
you, I believe, carry in your heart.
[back to prose] Just for a moment, it was possible for your good sense to
touch these verses. Pardon, I pray, an uneducated person: accept these with
a happy hand, and if the eagerness of the reviser asks for any changes,
instruct me fearlessly: I will obviously obey your orders.
The verse section seems to be presented as an experiment in which the
writer demonstrates with feigned modesty his ability to frame conventional
tropes of letters, such as enquiring after the correspondent’s health, the
issue of friendship or the replacement of face-to-face conversation, in verse,
while also suggesting that the addressee is more expert in this genre.
With a letter entirely written in verse, distinctions between poetic
genres may become blurred. In neo-Latin literature the fluid status of
such letters can be observed in the work of the humanist courtier
Caspar Ursinus Velius (c. 1493–1539), born in what is now Poland.
His Poematum libri quinque (1522) include a single book of verse
epistles, which includes poems in hexameters (after Horace) and in
elegiac couplets (after Ovid).12 Further variations can also be observed:
some pieces are entitled simply epistola, while several have more specific
descriptions, such as ‘satiric epistle’, ‘elegiac epistle’, ‘advisory epistle’,
‘birthday piece’. Clearly, genres like epistle and satire or epistle and
elegy have been combined, presumably again on the authority of the
works by Horace and Ovid.

12
Latin text in Velius 1522.
 Verse Letters 135
At the same time these hybrid letters display obvious epistolary features.
The ‘elegiac epistle’ to his brother Balthasar, for instance, begins and ends
as follows:
Vnde tibi ueniat si quæris epistola, frater
Ne dubites, fratris nomine scire potes.
Principio absentem cupio saluere, bonusque
Iuppiter optatis annuat oro tuis.
Quod nisi sors fuerat nobis contraria, coràm
Plurima quæ cogor scribere, dicta forent.
[. . .]
Cætera quæ nunc non locus est perscribere, missa
Perferet Hesperio littera ab orbe tibi.
Et properata suum nunc sumat epistola finem
Viue memor nostri frater, et usque uale.
If you are wondering from where this letter reaches you, brother, you should not
be in any doubt you can tell by the term ‘brother’. I wish first to greet you
although you are absent, and I beg that good Jupiter is favourable to your wishes.
If fortune had not been against us, very many things, which I am now forced to
write, would have been spoken face to face [. . .] A letter sent from the country of
Hesperia will bring you the rest of the news, about which I have no space to write
now. And quickly this letter shall now take its end. Live mindful of me, brother,
and continue to fare well.
There is nothing particularly elegiac in the opening and closing sections;
instead there is some play with the usual greeting formulae of letters,
supplemented by well-wishes for the addressee and the standard conceit
that a letter replaces oral conversation between the two interlocutors
because they are separated in place. In the body of the letter the poet talks
about his current situation and his life, thereby inserting elements of
Ovid’s exile poetry including his ‘autobiographical’ poem (Ov. Tr. 4.10).
So the piece is a mixture, as the title implies, but with the letter form
being dominant.
A different means of casting a poem as a letter appears in a work
(MS. Brit. Mus. Add. 19906, fol. 75) by the early humanist Antonio Lovati
(1241–1309):13 in a hexametric poem the persona talks to an interlocutor
about the literary question of whether one should write poetry in Latin or
rather in the style of French Chansons de geste. The form of the debate is
reminiscent of Horace’s literary satires (especially Hor. Sat. 2.1), but the
poem is followed by an elegiac couplet to a named addressee: ‘Our little
note sends greetings to you, Bellinus; as you like, regard this [poem] too as
13
Latin text, German commentary and interpretation in Ludwig 1987.
136 gesine manuwald
ended or completed.’14 These two lines, which include the term cartula
(‘little note’) and a conventional greeting, turn the preceding poem into a
verse epistle addressed to Bellino Bissolo, a contemporary doctor gramma-
ticae and magister from Milan, who wrote poetry himself. This character,
however, only becomes apparent subsequently by means of a couplet that
is separated from the actual argument.

Letters on Ethical and Literary Topics (after Horace’s Epistles)

Whereas there are Greek and Roman letters in prose, used as a medium to
discuss philosophical and/or literary topics (such as those of Epicurus and
Seneca), Horace’s epistles provide a model for treating ethical and literary
subjects in hexameter. Horace’s influence is obvious in Epistolarum seu
sermonum libri sex (‘Six Books of Epistles or Satires’, Paris 1585) by Michel
de l’Hôpital (Michael Hospitalius, c. 1504–73), Chancellor of France
under François II: the title refers to both Horatian hexametric collections,
the Epistolae (‘Letters’) and the Sermones (‘Satires’).15 The poems take up
Horatian topics: for instance, the first letter of the third book, addressed to
François Olivier (Franciscus Olivarius, 1497–1560), Chancellor of France
(Ad Franciscvm Olivarivm , Franciæ Cancellarium), comments on the
frequency of their meetings and correspondence; it then launches into
a consideration of the characters of true friends and the mutability of
public opinion.
This is followed by Olivier’s answer in prose (Francisci Olivarii ad
superiorem epistolam responsio, ‘François Olivier’s Reply to the Preceding
Letter’), in which he highlights Horatian and philosophical elements:
Ianus Morellus tuam nobis epistolam reddidit, versibus conscriptam
planè tuis, sed in queis teipsum quotidie superas. Candor, polities, lepos,
minimùm sunt in illis. At verò seria eruditio, sententiæ crebræ ac graues,
mira vbique sanitas sensuum, & per totum poëma (velut sanguis per
universum corpus) diffusa læta quædam gratia, ac iucunditas, me non
minus capiunt, non secus afficiunt, quàm Venusini tui doctissimæ epistolæ:
cui, haud scio, an sis olim apud posteros cessurus. vt interim taceam, quòd
totam tuam epistolam temperat optima artifex, Philosophia Christiana.
Ianus Morellus [i.e. Jean de Morel, 1511 81, poet and sponsor of a circle of
poets] has brought me your letter, which you have written clearly in verse, a

14
Cartula nostra tibi mittit, Belline, salutes; | Ut libet, hec etiam clausa vel acta putes.
15
Latin text in Hospitalius 1585; modern edition of Latin text in Duféy 1825 (vol. iii); French
translation in Bandy de Nalèche 1857; for overviews of the poet’s life see Anchel 1937; Kim 1997.
 Verse Letters 137
mode in which you surpass yourself every day. Clarity, polish and charm are
at any rate all there. But serious learning, frequent and forceful expressions,
an admirable good sense at every turn, and a kind of happy grace and
charm which is diffused throughout the poem (like blood through every
part of the body) these aspects of the poem win me over and touch me no
less than the learned letters of your Venusian [i.e. Horace]. I am not even
sure whether or not you shall have to yield to him at some point among
future readers. And that’s not to mention, for now, that the best artist of
all, Christian philosophy, shapes your entire letter.
Apart from the fact that the writer uses both ‘poem’ and ‘letter’ to refer to
the piece, he compares its effect and style to the epistles of Horace, while
he describes it as ‘Christian philosophy’, thereby indicating that the
Horatian tradition is followed, but that the views expressed correspond
to a contemporary ethical framework.
A looser connection to Horace is found in the work of the Dutch poet
Joannes Secundus (1511–36): in addition to letters in prose, he produced
a series of verse letters to family and friends (Epistolarum libri duo,
‘Two Books of Letters’, c. 1529–34), in which he discusses issues of
literature, art and personal relationships. With their spread of addressees
and subjects as well as their comments on literary issues and the absence of
a unifying situation, these letters are reminiscent of Horace rather than of
Ovid, although they include features taken from Ovid, such as the elegiac
metre for some of them and the notion of a great distance between sender
and addressee.
In one of those letters (1.7) Secundus, who, uniquely, was both a poet
and a sculptor, reflects upon his status as an artist, recalling Horace’s
discussions of his own poetry (Hor. Epist. 1.1; 1.19; 1.20; 2.1), but also
Ovid’s play with an image of himself in his epistles from exile (Ov. Tr. 1.7).
Secundus combines this with reflections on his love for ‘Julia’ in the
manner of Ovid’s love poetry. In this epistle, addressed to Jan Dantyszek
(Ioannes Dantiscus, 1485–1548), poet, letter-writer, bishop and diplomat,
Secundus defines himself as a caelator poeta, an ‘engraver poet’ (9; cf. El.
3.2.5: sculptore poeta).16
This piece, which is defined as an epistola (‘epistle’) by its place in a
collection of verse epistles, bears hardly any further signs defining it as
a letter: there are none of the standard opening or closing formulae
(or poetic variations thereof), no sense of a physical distance between
sender and addressee and no mention of previous communications, the

16
Latin text and French translation with notes in Guillot 2007.
138 gesine manuwald
health of one of the participants or other common epistolary themes. At
the same time, in addition to its formal assignment, this piece qualifies as a
letter since, although it includes personal reflections, it is addressed to the
correspondent throughout, and there is a sense that it is meant to commu-
nicate the poet’s answer to a request: Dantiscus has asked for an image
created by Secundus, presumably of Charles V (cf. El. 3.2), and Secundus
is loath to let it go. He uses this situation as an excuse to create a contrast
between Dantiscus, the great poet and patron, and the young, inexperi-
enced and unaccomplished Secundus, who would rather make portraits of
ordinary people, and he thus provides a kind of artistic variant of the
Augustan recusatio topos. Yet the poet ends with a reference to his beloved
Julia, who will be immortalized by a portrait sculpted by the lover poet and
in his poetry (1.7.45–8). This suggests, that, although the poet’s wish for
immortalizing the beloved is a stock classical motif (cf. e.g. Prop. 3.2; Ov.
Am. 1.3), Secundus, despite his protestations, is confident of his artistic
abilities, at least in the area of the art of love.

Letters from Exile (after Ovid’s Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto)

A clearly defined epistolary situation is that of absence from one’s home
country, due to exile or political upheaval; in Latin poetry this topic is
particularly associated with Ovid’s letters from exile at Tomis. Marco
Girolamo Vida (c. 1485–1566) did not produce an entire book of verse letters,
but his poetry includes two epistles. One of those (first published in the 1527
edition) is addressed to Gian Matteo Giberti (Joannes Matthæus Gibertus,
1495–1543), who is also the recipient of other pieces in the collection.17 Here
Vida reverses the usual scenario of a poet who writes home from exile:
instead, it is claimed that the addressee has been taken away from the sender
to distant shores. The writer describes the distance between the two of them
and the inhospitable nature of the other country, but also envisages how
things would be different if he could have accompanied the addressee and
spurs him on to go and defend his country. Hence, in addition to the tropes
adopted from Ovid’s exile poetry, there are influences of Virgil’s Aeneid,
notably in the chosen metre of the hexameter and the reworking of well-
known motifs of close companionship and separation.18 Besides this, there
are aspects of a propemptikon (e.g. Hor. Carm. 1.3) and elements of love

17
On the publication history see Di Cesare 1974: 231. Latin text in Vida 1732.
18
Cf. e.g. 9: Achates / Ascanius at Virg. Aen. 1.188; 2.723–4; 14: Dido at Virg. Aen. 4.381; 38–9: Juno at
Virg. Aen. 1.12–18.
 Verse Letters 139
elegy when the writer considers their separation and his loneliness, the
harsh conditions for the person abroad, the need to console his love and
the possibility of death.19 While the Ovidian letter from exile is the main
model, the writer creates a novel form of the ‘exile letter’ on the basis of a
wide range of reminiscences of classical Latin poetry.20

Letters on Autobiography / to Posterity (after Ovid, Tristia 4.10)

A particular variant of letters inspired by Ovid’s exile poetry are those
based on the sphragis of the Tristia, the final ‘signature’ poem of the
collection, where Ovid provides a review of his life in poetic form
(Ov. Tr. 4.10).21 The German poet Helius Eobanus Hessus (1488–1540)
ends the single book of the first edition of his Heroidum Christianarum
Epistolae (‘Letters of Christian Heroines’, published in 1514) with the
letter Eobanus Posteritati (‘Eobanus to Posterity’).22 This final letter (24)
and the first letter (Emmanuel Mariae, ‘Emmanuel to Maria’), which frame
the book, are the only letters written by men (see below). The opening
letter, despite its male author, has a justified presence, since it triggers the
second letter (Maria Emmanueli, ‘Maria to Emmanuel’), in the style of the
paired letters at the end of Ovid’s Heroides. The concluding letter, however,
does not really fit the context, even though Eobanus turns his fictive
addressee Posterity into a ‘goddess’ (24.1–2). But in this way Eobanus,
who has been called the ‘German Ovid’, manages to combine two types
of Ovidian letter: he imitates Ovid’s collection of Heroides, while giving it a
Christian framework, and ends the book with a personal statement in the
style of Ovid’s Tristia.
The poet sets this last letter apart as a dedicatory letter (24.121–6):
Tempore iam Caesar quo Maximus Aemilianus
In Venetos duri fulmina Martis agit,
Scribimus illustres heroidas ecce puellas.
Has tibi praecipue dedico, Posteritas.

19
Cf. e.g. 12, 53; beloved with another man at Prop. 1.8; 48–54; envisaged death of lover/beloved at
Prop. 2.13; Tib. 1.3; Ov. Tr. 3.3.
20 21
Similar principles are at work in Milton’s elegy to Charles Diodati (El. 1). See IJsewijn 1973.
22
The first edition was published in 1514; a revised version in three books came out in 1539. Latin text
of the entire first edition with English translation and notes in Vredeveld 2008; Latin text of the
second edition with German translation in Vredeveld 1990; Latin text of Eobanus Posteritati with
German translation and some notes in Schnur 1966: 210–19 and Kühlmann, Seidel and Wiegand
1997: 328–38, 1140–3. For the text of Eobanus’ works see also www.uni-mannheim.de/mateo/
camena/AUTBIO/hessus.html
140 gesine manuwald
Accipe, diva senex, gremio tua pignora amico,
Si potes, atque piae nomina matris habe.
Now, even as Emperor Maximus Aemilianus [i.e. Maximilian I, 1459 1519] is
hurling the thunderbolts of pitiless Mars against the Venetians [i.e. as a member
of the League of Cambrai], I am writing these heroic letters [‘Heroides’] from
famous girls. I dedicate them especially to you, Posterity. Take these children of
yours, divine old lady. Hold them lovingly on your lap, if you can, and be an
affectionate mother to them.
[trans. H. Vredeveld, slightly adapted]
The writer is aware of this letter’s special position (24.37–46):
Ultima tu nostras heroidas inter haberis,
Ultima nam cunctis rebus adesse soles.
Attamen, ut noris, primam te semper amavi,
O animae certe cura secunda meae!
[. . .]
Prima tamen cessit magnis reverentia divis.
Quem magis aeterna fama salute trahat?
Among my heroines [‘my Heroides’] you are the last, for you are used to being the
last in all things. Nevertheless, just so you know, I always loved you first O you,
definitely the second valued object of my soul! [. . .] My first reverence, however,
was reserved for almighty God. Who would be drawn more by fame than by
eternal salvation?
[trans. H. Vredeveld, adapted]
In this way Eobanus tackles the problem of adding an invocation to a
‘pagan goddess’ to a collection of Christian epistles: by giving her second
place, while insisting that he has adored her all his life. With the address to
Posterity the poet expresses his desire to survive and be read in future,
thereby taking up a conceit that ancient Roman poets have expressed
since Ennius in the Republican period (e.g. Enn. Var. 17–18 V.2; Ov.
Trist. 4.10.121–2; Hor. Carm. 3.30).
Indeed, the poet manages to incorporate a number of motifs in this
poem: an overview of his life and his early vocation to poetry; feigned
modesty; an expectation of more and better literary works in future as well
as future fame; an association with Virgil; a hymn to a goddess; the
relationship between poet and politician; the position of a person coming
from a humble background and different types of love affairs. Thus, while
the precedent of Ovid, transferred to a Christian context, is the main
model, the integration of other themes shows the flexibility of the letter
form.
 Verse Letters 141

Letters by Famous Women (after Ovid’s Heroides)

Eobanus’ Heroidum Christianarum epistolae indicate by their title that
they are to be seen in the tradition of Ovid’s Heroides,23 but also that
the motif of female letter writers has been transferred to a Christian
context (see above). After the opening letter from ‘Emmanuel’ to
‘Maria’ and her answer, the collection features a series of letters by
women who are mentioned in the Bible or are recognized as saints. In
substance it thus takes up canonical material and Christian legends,
promoting a different kind of love, while it continues Ovid’s allusive
writing style in sophisticated Latin poetry.24
In the first letter ‘Emmanuel’, i.e. ‘God’ or Jesus Christ (see Matthew
1.23), writes to Mary to announce his own birth, and when she receives the
letter from an angel she learns of the fate that is in store for her.25 In wording
this letter is full of reminiscences of classical pagan, late-antique Christian,
biblical and early modern texts. In content it is an informed vision of the
future, comparable to parts of Catullus’ Carmen 64 and particularly to
Virgil’s Eclogue 4. The letter is a conceit that allows the poet to create a
situation where ‘God’ can talk about his own role and that of his mother
before his own birth. The epistolary form is emphasized at the beginning
and end of the poem: the piece is defined as littera (1.2) and epistola (1.7);
there is a reference to handwriting (1.7: notae non . . . dextrae) and to the
delivery of the letter (1.3–6); it ends with the usual closing formula, explicitly
highlighted (1.207–8):26 ‘And now, so my brief letter may close with the
customary word, receive the wish that you yourself fulfil for all humanity:
Farewell.’ While in structure, wording and style the text is entirely classical,
there are suggestions that Christianity will overcome pagan Rome
(1.169–202) and Christian divinity will be more open and honest (1.149–52).
Employing the Ovidian structure of a paired letter and its reply, the
poet expresses Mary’s own reaction to the Annunciation in the following
poem. Although this is again a conceit, he still preserves the epistolary
fiction when he has Mary say (2.3–8):

23
For an overview of the genre see Dörrie 1968; White 2014; for examples in Germany see Thill 2003;
for examples in France see Dalla Valle 2003; for a discussion of Renaissance and modern approaches
to Ovid’s Heroides see Wiseman 2008.
24
On Eobanus both continuing and updating Ovidian practices, combining them with theological
beliefs of his time, see Suerbaum 2008.
25
In the second edition of the work (see n. 22 above) ‘Emmanuel’ has been changed to ‘God the
Father’ (Her. Chr. 1.1) with the necessary adjustments (see Vredeveld 2008: 159 n. 1).
26
Iam, brevis ut solito claudatur epistola verbo, | Accipe quod praestas omnibus ipsa ‘vale’. Text and
translations (with some minor alterations) from Vredeveld 2008.
142 gesine manuwald
Littera quod sparsis non convenit ista lituris,
Hoc breve mortalis dextera foecit opus,
Dextera, quae calamum vix nunc teneat aegra labantem.
Heu, miserae quanti ponderis instat onus!
Ausa humilis magno rescribere virgo Tonanti,
Quam ferat, aggredior, mens mea, maius opus.
If this letter, covered with erasures, is not appropriate, it is because this brief piece
was written by a mortal hand, a hand so shaky that it is barely able now to hold
the faltering pen. Alas, what an immense burden weighs upon me, poor soul!
A humble virgin, I have presumed to reply to the mighty Thunderer and am
undertaking a task too great for my mind to bear.
That a letter is written in a state of strong emotion (e.g. amid tears) is an
element in classical love letters (e.g. Ov. Her. 3.3–4; 4.175–6; 7.183–6;
15.97–8), which is here transferred to the awe that the human Mary feels at
being told that she will be the mother of ‘God’. When ‘God’ is addressed as
Tonans, a cult title of Jupiter in Roman religion is transferred to a Christian
context, so as to illustrate the power of the Christian God by analogy.27
The difference between human and divine is taken up at the end of the
poem, where the motifs of delivery, of informing the addressee and of
the standard closing formula are used, adapted to the unusual situation
(2.113–20):
Finge loqui coramque rudes offerre tabellas;
Mortalem non est posse docere Deum.
Clause sub hac lutea nostrae testudine carnis,
Littera praesenti traditur ista tibi.
Attamen aedidimus scriptas utcunque lituras.
Non erat in parva virgine grande sophos.
Non precor ut valeas, per quem valet omne quod usquam est.
Illud idem verum possit ut esse, fave.
Imagine talking to God and presenting him with a simple letter; to tell the Deity
something new is beyond the power of us mortals. Enclosed as you are beneath
the clayey shelter of my flesh, this letter is given to you as someone present. Yet,
I have just managed to write erasures. There is no great wisdom in a little virgin.
I do not pray that you ‘fare well’, you, through whom everything in the world
fares well. So that this may indeed come true, be gracious.
Obviously this letter can never be delivered, but this is the case with
many classical pagan poetic letters too. What is important is the

27
See also Her. Chr. 1.157: Virgo est paritura Tonantem, ‘A virgin shall bear the Thunderer’ in a telling
variation of Isaiah 7.14, where it is ‘a son’ (see Her. Chr. 2.37).
 Verse Letters 143
opportunity for poetic expression created by using a letter in such a
context. In this way the poet manages to give a novel twist to the well-
known story of the Annunciation and the familiar form of letters to and
from heroines.28
Inspired by the format found in Ovid, Eobanus has created an original
collection. Neo-Latin literature, however, also encompasses more direct
reactions to Ovid’s Heroides, in the form of immediate answers to poems in
Ovid’s collection.29 The earliest extant pieces are three letters by a poet
called Sabinus (Auli Sabini, poetae, epistolae tres ad Ovidianas epistolas
responsoriae, ‘Three Letters by the Poet Aulus Sabinus in answer to
Ovidian Letters’), answers to Heroides 1, 2 and 5 (first printed in 1477).30
There is a long-standing discussion on whether these letters are by an
ancient poet Sabinus mentioned by Ovid (Ov. Am. 2.18.27–34; Pont.
4.16.13–16) or by a Humanist writer of the same name.31 Both ‘Sabini’
seem to have composed answers to Ovid’s Heroides, but it now seems more
likely that the extant ones belong to the early modern Sabinus.32
The Sabinus letters were long considered ancient and therefore regarded as
models of similar status to Ovid’s own poems. As a result, although Ovid’s
Heroides were popular and there were a number of attempts at composing
answers, people avoided those that already had ‘ancient’ replies. The Scottish-
born poet Mark Alexander Boyd (Marcus Alexander Bodius, 1562–1601),
however, was unhappy with their quality and therefore produced his own
replies to all single letters in Heroides, which turns his work into the only
complete collection of reply epistles in Latin (1590).33 Shortly afterwards
(1592), Boyd produced another work inspired more loosely by Ovid’s
Heroides, consisting of a series of letters by Greek heroines, goddesses
and Roman heroines and imperial women, who do not appear in Ovid, as

28
Letters from Heaven constituted a popular genre from late antiquity throughout the Middle Ages
and into the early modern period, though these seem to have been more concerned with theological
doctrines (see Schnell 1983). Besides the classical precedent, these traditions may have influenced
Eobanus (on Eobanus and medieval traditions see Suerbaum 2008). A later example is François
Habert’s Epistre de Dieu le Père à la vierge Marie (Paris 1551) included in the collection Les Epistres
Heroides (see Dörrie 1968: 384; Vredeveld 2008: 159 n. 1).
29
For an overview of ‘reply poems’ in reaction to Ovid in the late sixteenth century see Lyne 2004.
30
Latin text in Sabinus 1583; modern edition of Latin text with German translation in Häuptli 1996:
118–42.
31
Also called Angelus Sabinus, Angelus de Curibus Sabinis, Angelus Sabinus de Curibus, Angelus
Gnaeus Quirinus Sabinus, Angelo Sani di Cure.
32
For an overview of the evidence and a discussion of the date see Geise 2001 (who argues for the
extant letters to be by the Humanist; contrast Häuptli 1996: 355–9, who regards them as ancient); on
Sabinus’ letters see White 2009: 191–9.
33
See e.g. Dörrie 1968: 104–5, 108.
144 gesine manuwald
well as a complementary letter from Pyramus to Thisbe.34 The fact that he
was effectively in exile in France at the time of composition may have
contributed to Boyd’s interest in Ovid.

Prefatory Letters
Most collections of letters prepared for publication by their authors open
with an initial letter that is both an epistolary piece like all other items, but
also fulfils the function of an introductory, prefatory and/or dedicatory
poem by setting out the rationale or background to the book or addressing
a recipient to whom not only this single letter, but the entire collection is
addressed (e.g. Hor. Epist. 1.1; Plin. Ep. 1.1).
An instructive example of this practice can be found in Francesco
Petrarca (Petrarch, 1304–74), who was so important in introducing the
humanist tradition of letter-writing. Petrarch’s collection of metrical
epistles, published towards the end of his life, opens with a dedicatory
letter (1.1) to his friend Barbato da Sulmona (c. 1300–63).35 This letter is
not separated from the rest of the work, as it would be if it introduced a
work in a different genre; it fulfils the introductory function by being the
first in the series. Although this is an entirely literary letter, not destined to
reach its addressee on its own, it takes up common epistolary topics, such
as the distance between sender and addressee and the notion that, there-
fore, familiar conversation, normally conveyed face to face, is entrusted to
writing (1.1.1–5, 25–8). At the same time it is a programmatic poem, in
which the author comments on the style and content of the further texts
that the addressee will read: they are products of his youth, low poetry,
somewhat unrefined and dealing with his romantic relationships
(1.1.32–44). He adds that he is now much older and changed (1.1.45–50)
and that he sends this material because the addressee has asked for it
(1.1.29–31). These are common elements of feigned modesty, which help to
create a certain expectation in the reader of the collection.
An introduction or dedication in the form of a letter can be prefaced to a
literary work of any genre. In ancient Rome prose letters introduce books
within the poetry collections of Martial and Statius as well as the eighth
book of the Gallic Wars written by Aulus Hirtius. In the early modern

34
A single letter without Ovidian precedent, from Thisbe to Pyramus, also appeared in the first
collection. On Boyd’s letters inspired by Ovid’s Heroides see Paleit 2008; White 2009: 207–15. Latin
text in Boyd 1590 and 1592; modern edition of the Latin text of some of the 1592 letters with German
translation and commentary in Ritter 2010.
35
Latin text in Petrarch 1831.
 Verse Letters 145
period, for instance, the Englishman Thomas Watson (1556–92) dedicated
a Latin translation of Sophocles’ Antigone (London 1581) to Philip Howard,
Earl of Arundel (1557–95), with a Latin poem.36 The title (Nobilissimo
Proceri, Claroque Multis nominibus, Philippo Howardo Comiti
Arundeliæ, Thomas Watsonvs solidam fœlicitatem precatur, ‘Thomas
Watson wishes the foremost nobleman and known by many names, Philip
Howard, Earl of Arundel, sound happiness’) imitates the structure of
opening greetings of classical letters. The poet then starts the poem proper
by addressing the recipient in wording reminiscent of Horace’s first ode,
goes on to talk about his own poetic abilities and finishes by entrusting his
work to the addressee and adding a closing formula of salutation:
Hæc, et plura tuis planè præfiget ocellis
Antigone, studio docta docere meo.
Uiue, vale Generose Comes: quot sæcula ceruus
Uiuit, tot fœlix sæcula viue: vale.
This and more will be brought clearly before your eyes by Antigone, taught to
teach by my endeavours. Live long and farewell, generous Earl: as many centuries
as the stag lives, may you live happily for as many centuries: farewell.
Such classically inspired openings can also be found in explicitly Christian
texts. The translation of the New Testament by John Bridges (1536–1618),
bishop of Oxford, which also shows its debt to classical antiquity by its
hexametric form, opens with a series of poems (addressed to various
recipients) that have characteristics of letters, though also of hymns and
prayers:37 this prefatory series starts with a prayer (Precatio) to Deus
Optimus Maximus and the Holy Trinity, is followed by a salutation to
King James I and concludes with an address to the reader. The poem to the
king is in large parts a praise of him, but it begins and ends with greeting
formulae (Salutem, ‘Greetings’ / Vive Iacobe, ‘Hail, James’) and thus could
be regarded as a letter in its outward shape. The preface addresses the
reader only in the heading, not in the body of the poem (Ad Pium &
Benevolum Lectorem, ‘To the Kind and Benevolent Reader’), and has few
epistolary features; rather it is a statement of the novelty of the enterprise,
with obvious allusions to non-epistolary classical texts (In nova fert
animus . . . ‘The mind carries to new . . . ’; cf. Ov. Met. 1.1). This series

36
Latin text in Watson 1581; also available at: www.philological.bham.ac.uk/watson/antigone/act1lat
.html#how1
English translation by Sutton (2010/2011) at: www.philological.bham.ac.uk/watson/antigone/
act1eng.html#broel
37
Latin text in Bridges 1604.
146 gesine manuwald
demonstrates the range of options that introductory poems to a specific
addressee, based on the letter form, can take and shows again the fusion
of (classical) literary, Christian and political elements, here in the context
of prefatory material.38

Conclusion
Even the few examples presented demonstrate that writers of neo-Latin
verse epistles covered the entire spectrum of types of verse letters intro-
duced by classical poets and developed their own pieces against the
background of these predecessors. While in general ‘[l]etters – whether
prose or metric, overtly fictional or apparently historical – should be
understood, first and foremost, as self-conscious textual constructions’,39
this is particularly true for Humanist letters in Latin, since they were
written in full awareness of the ancient models and of the generic discus-
sion surrounding them and, though conceived as private letters for an
individual addressee, are primarily intended as literature destined for
publication. Writers of neo-Latin verse epistles may respond directly to
classical Latin texts (as in the case of answers, imitations or supplements
to Ovid’s Heroides), allude to them in their titles (as in the case of Horace
or some of Ovid’s works), rely on contrastive imitation (when a classical
motif, such as letters by heroines, is transferred to a Christian context) or
establish a more indirect connection by the use of shared themes and ideas;
they may even mix different types of letters within a single collection or
insert verse epistles among other pieces. Freer responses to classical prece-
dents, and creative use of elements provided by them in novel contexts,
often seem to emerge from initial closer adherence to models. The epistol-
ary genre has always been of a flexible nature: the compositions in the early
modern period display a variety that indicates the Humanists’ creative
interest in this genre and the aim to explore its full potential.

F U R T H E R RE A D IN G
Apart from the brief remarks in IJsewijn and Sacré 1998 and the short entry in
Brill’s Encyclopaedia of the Neo-Latin World (Porter 2014a), there is no overview of
the genre of the early modern verse epistle in Latin. Dörrie 1968 (in German)
presents the material for the subgenre of the heroic letter (for its reception in

38
In this context generic boundaries are especially fluid (cf. dedicatory epigrams), and the perception
of a poem’s generic status may be influenced by the layout of an early modern edition.
39
Ebbeler 2010: 465.
 Verse Letters 147
sixteenth century France and some telling case studies see White 2009). For a
flavour of early modern letter writing in Latin, the best places to start are
letter collections for which modern editions (and translations) exist (Secundus:
Guillot 2007; Eobanus Hessus: Vredeveld 2004/2008; Boyd: Ritter 2010 (in
German)). Works on ‘letters’ in general, with an emphasis on antiquity,
provide the necessary background on the characteristics of the genre (e.g.
Sykutris 1931 (in German); Thraede 1970 (in German); Reed 1997; Trapp
2003; Edwards 2005; Gibson and Morrison 2007; Ebbeler 2010. On the book
of epistles as a particular poetic form see Wulfram 2008 (in German). Studies on
early modern letters in the vernacular and letter writing in this period are helpful
for an understanding of aspects of the form and for insights into its role in early
modern society (see e.g. Guillén 1986; Overton 2007: 1 31, on generic issues;
Williamson 2001; Overton 2007, on English letters; Motsch 1974 (in German),
on German letters). Besides actual letter writing, there are theoretical works on
letters and practical manuals (on those see esp. Poster and Mitchell 2007; also
Chartier, Boureau and Dauphin 1997). For a collection of ‘Some Sources for
Early Modern Letters’ see http://warburg.sas.ac.uk/research/completed research
projects/scaliger/sources early modern letters/.
 chapter 9

Verse Satire
Sari Kivistö

Writing Satire
One of the distinctive features of Roman verse satire is a meta-poetical
commentary on the poet’s reasons for writing satire. In his programmatic
satires 1.4 and 2.1, Horace defends the castigating function of his work and
justifies it against accusations of malice. He stresses that the ethical utility
of his humorous verse is far removed from real malevolence, and traces the
origins of the genre to the Greek comedians and the early Latin author
Lucilius.1 Thereafter, it became customary for collections of verse satire to
begin with a defence of the genre, based on both moral utility and literary
precedent. Satire was a difficult genre to accept, especially in religious
circles, since it described vices, had frequent recourse to verbal harshness
and expressed strong negative feelings of indignation on the part of the
poet. Obscene and abusive passages, and subjects not usually considered
suitable for poetry, were justified by the poet’s claim to censure vice.
Accordingly, neo-Latin satirists usually provided moral justifications for
their poetry and praised its great benefits to humanity. The Dutch histor-
ian Lambertus Hortensius (1500–74), who studied literary and educational
issues in his Satyrae viii (1552), claimed that unjust deeds filled his stomach
with black bile and forced him to take up his pen.2 The German play-
wright and theologian Thomas Naogeorg (1508–63), in his Satyrarum libri
quinque (‘Five Books of Satires’, 1555), defended the didactic-moralistic
usefulness of satirical criticism even in matters pertaining to religion. In his
dedicatory epistle to the margrave of Brandenburg, Georg Friedrich,
Naogeorg declared himself the first German satirist to follow the example
of his Roman predecessors and the Italian neo-Latin satirist Francesco
Filelfo, although he disdained their obscenity.3 Naogeorg claimed that no

1 2
Hor. Sat. 1.4.1–21, 78–103, 134–5; 2.1.24–59. Hortensius 1552: C2 (Sat. 6).
3
Naogeorg 1555: 4. Neo-Latin hexameter satires were first written in fifteenth-century Italy and then in
almost all European countries. In addition to Filelfo’s exceptionally large corpus of satires other

148
 Verse Satire 149
one should take offence at his verses, since they included no personal
attacks, but rather censured vicious action in general. His purpose was to
praise true piety by ridiculing men who declined to follow Christ.
He argued that if his intention to strengthen faith was disrespectful and
if his poems were considered malicious, then:
Hieronymus, Cyprianus, Chrysostomus atque alii ecclesiastici scriptores,
immo etiam omnes prophetae et apostolae, Christusque ipse maledicus
existimetur. Quoties enim prophetae invehuntur in idolorum cultores, in
impios sacerdotes et prophetas, in tyrannicos avarosque principum mores,
in corrupta perversaque vulgi studia, vitiaque multitudinis vel privatorum?
[. . .] Non est hoc maledicentia, nec conviciandi vel libido vel morbus: sed
admonitio, sed correctio, zelusque pro domo regnoque Dei.4
Jerome, Cyprian, Chrysostom and other religious authors, all prophets,
apostles and Christ himself should be considered equally abusive. Didn’t
the prophets often attack the worshippers of false idols, impious priests and
prophets, tyrannical and greedy princes, corrupted and perverse activities of
the crowd, vices of the multitude or of individuals? [. . .] This activity
should not be considered as slander or a sick desire to abuse, but as
exhortation and correction and zeal to protect God’s temple and reign.
Naogeorg claimed that, amidst the ubiquity of crimes, his poetic condem-
nation of vices was a necessary and honest activity, even an act of charity.
The religious convulsions of the Reformation produced conditions
particularly conducive to satire and anti-clerical humour, especially in
sixteenth-century Germany. Catholics and Protestants attacked each other
with increasing ferocity, and the reformers shared the satirical conception
of the fundamentally sinful nature of human beings. One of Naogeorg’s
longer satires (5.1) envisaged the beauties of Paradise and universal peace,
which were lost when the serpent seduced Eve. Naogeorg’s work is marked
by a focus upon repentance.5 But his satire was also strongly Protestant in
its flavour – in 1559 he published a satire of ecclesiastical censorship and
in defence of alleged heretics,6 and in his anti-papist Reformation plays,
which are better known than his satires, he depicted the pope as an
Antichrist.7 His vitriol was also directed at Luther, however, who was

important early Italian writers of satire were Gregorio Correr, Gaspare Tribraco (Tribrachus),
Lorenzo Lippi and Tito Vespasiano Strozzi.
4
Naogeorg 1555: 6–7. Translations from Latin are by the author unless otherwise indicated.
5 6
Cf. Roloff 2003: 390. Naogeorg 1559.
7
Naogeorg wrote six plays in Latin. His most famous play is Tragœdia nova Pammachius (Wittenberg,
1538), which depicts an evil pope, who is also one of the characters in Incendia seu Pyrgopolinices
(Wittenberg, 1541); see Roloff 2003; Watanabe-O’Kelly 1997: 102.
150 sari kivistö
the object of two virulent poems in his fifth book of satires (5.3 and 5.5).
In these, Luther and his circle in Wittenberg are identified as a new pope
and a second Rome, sinfully believing themselves to be infallible in their
interpretation of God’s word.
Later neo-Latin satirists also claimed their writing was founded on an
impulse to virtue. Gerard Nicolaas Heerkens (1726–1801), for instance,
who published his satires under the Latinized form of his name, Marius
Curillus, was a Groningen-based physician and poet whose seven verse
satires (Satyrae, 1758) attacked his fellow citizens and contemporary poets;
yet the primary focus was, in the manner of Horace’s and Juvenal’s first
satires, on his personal motives for writing, and his feelings of despair and
impotence.8 One purpose of his moral instruction was to prevent his
presumably untalented fellow writers from creating poetry. His first satire
evokes Juvenal’s opening lines, asking whether ‘I will always have to seem
insane and unable to reject the siren-call of the Muses and the compul-
sion to write poetry?’ (Semper ego insanus videar, numquamne poetis / me
potero eximere, et sirenes spernere Musas?).9 Heerkens ridiculed his own
efforts at writing, and ironically denounced his vain hopes of being
crowned ‘the second Horace’ or regarded the equal of Alexander Pope
or Nicolas Boileau. In his sixth satire Heerkens said that he would rather
die unknown than acquire a great name through hostility and invective.
For Heerkens, moderate jesting (the Aristotelian virtue of eutrapelia)
was suited to castigating human vices, while a poet should avoid excessive
joking and low buffoonery, which fiercely attack everyone without
discrimination.10
Many neo-Latin satirists refrained entirely from personal attack and
asserted that all persons mentioned in their satires were purely fictitious.11
At the other extreme were the poets who developed an unusually severe
style, unafraid to name names: the fiery German satirist Nicodemus
Frischlin (1547–90) wrote in 1567–8 eight relentless satires against a
Catholic convert, Jacob Rabus; and the fourteen satires of the Italian
satirist Quintus Sectanus (Lodovico Sergardi, 1660–1726) were

8
Heerkens 1758.
9
Heerkens 1758: 1.1–2. The lines reverse Juvenal, who begins by asking whether he must always listen
(to others’ bad poetry) and never speak himself (Juvenal S. 1.1–6).
10
Cf. Horace’s satires 1.4.81–103 and 1.10.7, in which he expressed very similar views.
11
For example, Federigo Nomi’s (1703) use of traditional comical names, such as Curculio,
emphasized the alleged impersonality and harmlessness of his writing. The word “gurgulio” was
used in Persius’ satires (4.38) to refer to Alcibiades’ private parts. Many of the persons mentioned in
Horace’s first three satires were also probably entirely fictitious.
 Verse Satire 151
unconstrained verbal assaults against a specific literary foe, the jurist Gian
Vincenzo Gravina from Naples.12 In his ninth satire and its figurative
emasculation Sergardi dreams of removing Gravina’s testicles and
imagines how an ugly hernia is slowly but surely devouring his body
and finally causing his death:
Foeda tibi nimium ruptis tumet Ernia fibris
irtaque pendentes lambunt crura Enterocelae
ut scrotum nequeat centum tibi fascia vittis
cingere, ni doctos transmittat Nursia cultros
vulnere qui medico vellant ab origine morbum.
Sed quota pars hominis Calabro restaret ademptis
Testiculis?13
An ugly hernia swells in your ruptured groin and hangs down, caressing your hairy
legs, so that a truss with a hundred bindings can’t encompass your scrotum unless
Nursia dispatches its trained surgeons to tear out the malady from its source by
a healing wound. But how much of a man remains for a Calabrian with his
testicles removed?14

Bad Poets and Ignorance

In his seminal article on neo-Latin satire, Josef IJsewijn claimed that, in
addition to general moralizing, the neo-Latin verse satirists were particu-
larly interested in literary, religious and medical themes.15 We have already
seen an example of the first preoccupation in the work of Heerkens; the
alleged distinction between good and bad poets was frequently evoked in
the early sixteenth-century humanist polemics and earlier by Gregorio
Correr and other fifteenth-century Italian poets.16 The Dutchman Petrus
Montanus’ (1467/8–1507) satire ‘De poetis’, for instance, distinguishes
between divine poets and mere verse-makers.17 According to Montanus,
composing true poetry was a task requiring divine inspiration: abandoning
worldly concerns, the poet was captivated at night by visions of Neptune’s
trident and Pallas’ shield. The true poet was humble and peaceful, whereas
bad poets flattered princes and were adored by the crowd, though without
merit.18 Montanus drew heavily on classical and Christian writers, and, in

12 13
Frischlin 1607; Sectanus 1698; Sergardi 1994. Sectanus 1698: 68.
14 15 16
Sergardi 1994: 77 (trans. Ronald E. Pepin). IJsewijn 1976: 44. See Ramos 2002: 181–4.
17
Montanus 1529. Montanus wrote twelve verse satires that appeared in different editions between
1501 and 1515; I have consulted the Strasbourg edition of 1529 with four satires.
18
Montanus 1529, Sat. 1.
152 sari kivistö
the manner of his admired Italian Renaissance humanist Marsilio Ficino,
was fascinated by reconciling Platonism with Christianity.19
In his first satire Thomas Naogeorg also complained that the world was
full of scribblers who were obsessed by a desire to write enormous books
with no concern beyond that of personal advancement. In the manner of
Juvenal’s programmatic first satire, Naogeorg asked why he should remain
merely a listener amidst such fervent industry, when everyone from
women to artisans wanted to publish something (1.1). He scorned poets
who soothed their patrons’ ears (ingratorum mulcemus versibus aures)20 and
flattered princes and papists in pursuit of fame and privileges: Impia tu
laudare potes, verumque lucroso / dissimulare metu (‘you can praise impious
deeds, and conceal the truth because you are worrying about money’).21
He ridiculed the obscure style with which the poets tricked their unlearned
audience and concealed their lack of talent and wisdom. Praising clarity of
diction, Naogeorg advised that poems should be ‘clearer than the water in
the fountain, the Venetian glass, pure crystal or the fire of electricity’
(fontana clarior unda, / vitro lucidior Veneto, et tenui cristallo / purior, electro
quoque pellucentior omni).22 Only mad poets wrote so obscurely that no
one understood them or needed an oracle to solve their riddles.23 The
critique of contemporary patronage is strongly indebted to Juvenal (espe-
cially satire 7), but unlike Juvenal, Naogeorg complained in particular
about the poetry of invective and personal attack: his satire 3.2, for
instance, denounces the malevolent poetic tendency to find fault in
everyone and to disseminate rumours purely to demonstrate a talent for
invective. To mock such groundless self-confidence and everyday nastiness
Naogeorg described how a backbiting professor of law had the ridiculous
habit of adding the word omnino to every sentence.24 In Naogeorg’s view
learned men regarded themselves as infallible and ‘wiser than Solomon, as
if they were born from the brains of Zeus, like Athene’ (Solus nempe sapis,
Salomone peritior ipso, / Et Iovis excisus seu docta Minerva cerebro).25
Caspar von Barth (1587–1658) was another German poet whose Satirarum
liber unus (1612) made a ferocious assault upon pompous verse-makers and
their groundless fame.26 Barth’s versatile, strongly mannerist satires lashed
out at his contemporary poets as vile bubbles, mere ghosts and skins lacking

19
See Tournoy 1998: 88.
20
Naogeorg 2.1; 1555: 60. For the importance of ears in Persius and Latin verse satire, see Kivistö 2009:
120 (with further references).
21 22
Naogeorg 2.1; 1555: 58. Naogeorg 2.1; 1555: 60.
23 24
For obscurity, see Kivistö 2002: 78–109. Naogeorg 3.2; 1555: 110.
25 26
Naogeorg 4.5; 1555: 173. Barth 1612.
 Verse Satire 153
blood and moisture. Their minds were full of lead, and in the place of a
heart they had a mushroom (Plumbea mens istis, pro corde in pectore
fungus).27 Their itchy bodies were full of pus that reflected their mental
confusion, and when touched, their sick limbs released the virus into the
world (Tangere si poscas, tot pus virusque cavernis / exsilit).28 Barth mocked
poetic apes who imitated manly gestures and, dressed in the cothurnus, took
a few trembling steps with their bowed legs (Cruribus incurvis rectos implere
cothurnos, / bestia decipitur).29 Barth ended his colourful satires (1.5) with
an exhortation to surgeons to tear out the malady from the sick generation
and burn their flesh with fire.
In their ethical pessimism the satirists usually saw the contemporary
world as the worst of times. Eilert Lübben (Eilhard Lubinus, 1565–1621), a
cartographer and professor of poetics and theology at Rostock who yearned
for a lost golden age, referred to his own deplorable era as the age of filth,
mud and monsters. Lübben delivered three verse declamations at Rostock
between the years 1602 and 1618; these were published as Declamationes
satyricae tres in 1618 (‘Three Satirical Declamations’).30 Lübben’s specific
targets in his first satire were the ignorant learned, who never lived as they
taught, and he depicted the sins of academics who cared only for their
personal obsessions, with no real self-knowledge:
Quid te scire iuvat tot tanta scientiae et artis,
Si nihil in melius tot rerum proficis usu?
grammatici errores memorant patientis Ulyssis,
Atque ipsi in vita et factis rationis aberrant
A regione procul [. . .]
Quid te porro iuvat geometram illa arte profunda
Metiri terras et agros, cum dividere aeque
Non possis cum fratre tuo, atque nepote propinquo.31
What’s the use of learning so many sciences and arts
if all that knowledge does not improve your character?
The grammarians calculate patient Ulysses’ errors,
but stray in their own lives and deeds farther and farther
from the land of reason [. . .]
What’s the use of you, a surveyor, knowing how to skilfully
measure lands and fields, when you fail to divide them justly
with your brother and his descendants?

27 28 29
Barth 1.1.198. Barth 1.1.272–3. Barth 1.3.26–7.
30
Lubinus 1618. Lübben was also known for his editions of the three Roman verse satirists; in fact,
many neo-Latin satirists edited Roman verse satire.
31
Lubinus 1618: A8r–v (Sat. 1).
154 sari kivistö
Lübben was highly sceptical of the future of the academy. In his view school
education was in the grip of barbarism – a popular satirical and anti-scholastic
topic in German humanism. In the second satire, directed against ‘academic
pests’, the ruinous state of the university was illustrated with an image of a
glorious, but collapsing building.32 Relying on the tradition of German
university satire, Lübben disapproved of students who in their groundless
self-confidence failed to learn anything, while at the same time he censured
severe schoolmasters and pedantic pedagogues who taught with strict rules
and, armed with cruel whips, were more formidable than ancient tyrants or
executioners and made pupils tremble with fear. Lübben adopted expressions
from Roman satire, including pathological ulcers and putrid filth swelling
inside the body, to describe human corruption, and in the manner of Persius
he pulled old biases out of his patient’s lungs.33 But unlike his classical
predecessors who deplored human ignorance in general, Lübben and many
of his contemporaries concentrated on the ignorance of the schoolmen.

Philosophical Satire
Renaissance poetics and humanist commentaries on Roman satire recog-
nized the close connection between moral philosophy and satirical writing.
Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614) argued in his commentary on Persius (1605)
that Roman satire consisted of two main principles: moral doctrine and
wit.34 Satire differed from other poetry in using humour to condemn vices
and recommend virtues. Satire not only set out to heal the moral and
emotional life of the patient by attacking his appetites and passions,
but also to cure his intellect of ignorance and foolishness. It aimed at an
overall perfection of the soul. Urceo Codro (Antonius Codrus Urceus,
1446–1500), professor of grammar and eloquence at Bologna, used his
second satire, for instance, to attack ignorance, but also explained in detail
the physical constituents of vices and their basis in the bodily fluids.35
Alongside the classical Latin satirists, Horace, Juvenal and Persius, many
neo-Latin authors of satire associated their work with Cynicism or
Stoicism, and especially with Seneca. Petrus Scholirius from Antwerp
(1583–1635), whose satires, Sermonum familiarium libri tres (‘Three Books
of Familiar Sermons’), first appeared in the 1620s and then in Albert Le
Roy’s detailed edition of 1683, devoted his third book to the defence of
32
Lubinus 1618: C4v (Sat. 2). 33
Lubinus 1618: C5v (Sat. 2); cf. Pers. 5.92.
34
Casaubon 1605b: aij (doctrina moralis, urbanitas et sales). Casaubon also composed an influential
treatise on Greek satirical poetry and Roman satire (Casaubon 1605).
35
Urceus 1506: lviiir–lixv.
 Verse Satire 155
Diogenes and his thinking.36 Naogeorg’s satires appeared together with his
Latin translation of Plutarch’s essay on tranquillity of mind and his edition of
Seneca’s De tranquillitate animi, thereby stressing the parallels between satir-
ical and philosophical instruction.37 The three satires of the Ghent humanist
Jan van Havre (Johannes Havraeus, 1551–1625), entitled Arx virtutis sive de vera
animi tranquillitate (‘The Fortress of Virtue or on the True Tranquillity of
Mind,’ 1627), also adopt a Stoic position.38 In his first satire, directed at human
desires and especially at the desire for money, Havre noted that men were
hardly ever satisfied with their lot. Since ambition was the enemy of peaceful
living, Havre claimed that it was better to decline the pursuit of fame, honours
or riches, which were far less valuable than virtue and a peaceful mind.
In a moralizing version of the priamel at the start of Horace’s first book
of satires, Havre describes the sins characteristic of different professions.
Soldiers play with death, slaughtering innocent people, and merchants sail
over distant seas facing thousands of dangers, lured on by the false glitter of
gold. True freedom and contentment are found in self-sufficiency:

Ecquid habent Reges, nisi solum tegmen & escam?

Haec quoque pauper habet, qui si nihil ambiat ultra,
Atque humili lare tranquille et bene vivere curet.
Quisnam adeo ignarus, qui non hunc esse beatum,
Et mage felicem ducat, quam sceptra tenentes,
Qui magna ut teneant, semper maiora requirunt?
Divitias multi affectant, paucique fruuntur.
Multis dat fortuna nimis, numquam satis ulli.
Servitium hic splendet, ubi splendet magna potestas.
Quis Cynicum testa clausum non praeferat illi,
Qui satur haud uno plures sibi postulat orbes?39
What do kings own except a roof over their heads and some food?
But these things the poor man also possesses, who wishes for nothing,
but to live peacefully and well in his humble cottage.
Who would be as ignorant as to deny that the poor man is happy
and indeed happier than those holding the reins of power,
since however much wealth they possess, they will always desire more.
Most men strive for riches, but only few enjoy them.
Fortune grants too much to many, but to no one ever enough.
Where great power reigns, there reigns servility too.
Who would not regard the Cynic living in his tub
more fortunate than the man who, dissatisfied with one world,
requests more?

36 37 38 39
Scholirius 1683. Naogeorg 1555. Havraeus 1627. Havraeus 1627: 24 (Sat. 1).
156 sari kivistö
Havre’s second satire also focused on the value of virtue as the most
precious property that men could have, but in this poem he extends his
vision of freedom and self-sufficiency to include the poet’s freedom of
speech: ‘No anger or faces sneering with menacing contempt can deter
me from speaking the truth and protecting justice’ (Non irae, torvi
vultus, fastusque minaces, / Impedient me vera loqui, iustumque tueri).40
The third satire, against violence and anger, forges a strongly Christian
message from many elements inherited from the Roman satirists and
historians.
Petrus Montanus’ satire ‘De principibus’ (‘On princes’) also censured
violence and the cruelty of political leaders, citing the savagery of Herod,
Alexander the Great, the Langobards, wealthy Asian kings and even
Christian bishops.41 The Langobards, he claims, had rulers who called
upon their wives to drink wine out of their fathers’ skulls. Montanus
warned that bad rulers often faced a terrible end: if they did not spend the
rest of their days in prison, their lives ended in suicide or poisoning. The
purpose of these tragic atrocities was to teach princes to know themselves,
to recognize the corrupting impact of power and to encourage them
towards humanity and Christian modesty. The kings of the golden age
were known for their ‘love, moderation and industry’ (amor, modus atque
industria).42

Medical Satires
The association of satirical writing with moral therapy was a commonplace
evoked, for example, by the Jesuit satirist Jacob Balde (1604–68) in his
large satirical œuvre.43 In his Medicinae gloria per satyras xxii (‘The Glory
of Medicine in Twenty-Two Satires’, 1651), Balde compared his fearless
verses to medicine ‘which abolishes diseases of the body by using bitter but
efficient drinks and seasons them with sweet juices so that they would not
be rejected. Satire penetrates the mind and, by removing vices, endeavours
to restore the temperance of manners’ (Ista corporum morbos tollit, potio-
nibus quidem amaris, sed efficacibus; et, ne respuantur, dulci liquore correctis.
Satyra animos intrat, ejectisque vitiis morum temperiem quaerit inducere.)44
In the first poem of his Medicinae gloria Balde proposed that even if he
could not heal like Persius, he would still write like Matho, composing

40 41 42
Havraeus 1627: 30 (Sat. 2). Montanus 1529, Sat. 3. Montanus 1529, Sat. 3.
43 44
See Kivistö 2009. Balde 1990: 369 (‘Ad candidum lectorem’).
 Verse Satire 157
lamentations at people’s graves. In the use of satire as moral therapy Balde
was following the example of Horace who offered sweet biscuits to patients
and spiced his bitter potion with honey: the playfulness of his verse
functioned as an antidote to pain.45
Balde wrote satires about many diseases affecting corrupt humankind.
Gout was the subject of several satirical texts in the early modern period,
because it was thought to result from self-indulgent and luxurious living
(cf. Juv. 13.96). In his Solatium podagricorum seu lusus satyricus (‘Consola-
tion for Gout Patients or a Satirical Jest’, 1661), Balde mentioned that
gout was a painful disease that dressed itself in jewels and refused to eat
onions and other rustic food.46 However, he praised the disorder as a
route to virtue, since the suffering man had the opportunity to disdain
his body and aspire to heaven. Balde represented Christian neo-Stoicism,
which had become a prominent mode of thinking in the Baroque period,
but he always preserved his characteristic irony in his discussions of the
good life.47
Balde often positioned his poems in the satirical subgenre of the mock
encomium. One of his paradoxical praises focused on obesity, a quality of
the gods, which he praised in his Antagathyrsus sive apologia pinguium
(‘Antagathyrsus or an Apology for Fat People’, 1658).48 Here he praises
fatness as a mark of the golden age when all men were nicely corpulent and
there was not a single thin or suffering person on earth. Balde attributed to
fat people the virtues of friendliness, reliability and upright character,
citing Horace’s own ironic self-description as a plump pig from Epicurus’
herd (Ep. 1.4.16). Similarly, in his Vultuosae torvitatis encomium (‘In Praise
of the Ugliness of Faces’, 1658) Balde discussed the great benefits of looking
severe and even ugly.49 The ugly physical forms of the famous ancient
philosophers bespoke their wisdom and revealed that they despised their
bodies and were completely devoted to virtue. Balde’s large œuvre also
contained a satire on the misuse of tobacco (Contra abusum tabaci, ‘Against
the Abuse of Tobacco’, 1657), noticing that smokers smelled worse than
the belches of onion-eating workers, seven graves or a herd of a hundred
goats.50 (Ironically, Balde himself was known to be addicted to smoking.)
Balde derided the incompetence of simiae medicorum (‘medical apes’),
Jewish poisoners and female quacks, who mixed medicines with stoats’

45
Balde 1990: 373 (Sat. 1): Illius exemplo, qui aegrotis crustula blanda / Offert, et succos apianis condit
amaros: / Nos melimella uno pariterque absinthia Libro / Miscuimus . . .Cf. Hor. Sat. 1.1.25 and 2.4.24.
46 47 48 49
Balde 1990: 63, 65. Schäfer 1976: 215–18. Balde 1990: 299–366. Balde 1660.
50
Balde 1990: 438–68.
158 sari kivistö
brains and foxes’ spleens. Inept physicians were popular figures of fun in
Renaissance satires, epigrams and facetiae collections that condemned the
incompetence of quacks or laughed at the scatological techniques used in
therapy. Doctor stereotypes were suspected of a myriad of abuses and
moral failings, including poisoning, adultery, money-making and violence.
Petrus Montanus’ satire ‘De medicis’, by contrast, presented an exemplary
physician Antonius, who was thoroughly acquainted with all medical
plants, unguents, plasters, pills, scented body powders and cataplasms,
and punctiliously calculated the right doses of medicine according to the
climate in which the disease occurred.51 Antonius was not only a skilful
physician, but also ‘good, wise and faithful to his friends’ (Vir bonus et
prudens, certis quoque fidus amicis),52 thus resembling the ideal doctor and
loyal friend described by Horace in his satires (2.3.147) and Seneca in his
De beneficiis (6.16.4–5), who took personal care of his patient in the name
of humanity. Antonius’ ideal figure was then contrasted with bad phys-
icians, who put patients to death for money and whose murderous skills
developed over a lifetime.
Bad doctors and their violent methods were similarly condemned by the
Italian satirist and presbyter Federigo Nomi (1633–1705), whose Liber satyr-
arum (‘The Book of Satires’, 1703) contained, like Juvenal’s œuvre, sixteen
satires.53 Influenced by the tradition, Nomi compared his verses to strong
medicines. His sixth satire focused on sadistic quacks, ‘who were more suited
to disturbing the dead than healing the living’.54 Nomi borrowed several
doctors’ names, such as Diaulus and Symmachus, from Aristophanes and
Martial’s epigrams. Martial’s Diaulus (1.30, 47), for instance, was a former
physician whose professional methods had hardly changed in his new career
as an undertaker. Nomi envisaged how doctors who specialized in bloodlet-
ting left their patients bleeding to death as highwaymen left their victims on
the side of the road. Rich patients were forced to swallow their own gems
and jewels, which were prescribed to relieve their condition, but which the
greedy doctor then collected from the patients’ chamber pots, thus becom-
ing rich through heaps of excrement. Kidney stone patients had to undergo a
painful treatment conducted by a surgeon called Phaedrus:
Vesica ex ipsa lapides convellere Phaedrus,
Spondet posse manu, sed quamquam prospera sit sors
Interdum, certe est ars haec laniena virorum;
Forcipe enim primo non carpitur orbita nisu,

51 52 53
Montanus 1529, Sat. 2. Montanus 1529, Sat. 2. Nomi 1703.
54
Nomi 1703: 77 (Sat. 6).
 Verse Satire 159
Fragmina vel desunt, remanet vel crustula circum,
Et dolor augetur.55
Phaedrus promised to remove the kidney stones
by hand. Even if fortune is sometimes favourable,
this is surely a butcher’s art.
The first attempt with forceps was unsuccessful;
some chips of the stone remained in the bladder,
and the pain was getting more severe.
In an unusual version of the medical motif, the Italian Bernardo Guglielmini
(1693–1769) offers in his Sermonum libri tres (‘Three Books of Sermons’,
Rome, 1742) an exceptionally realistic account of his own sickness. Gugliel-
mini’s twenty-four didactic satires were addressed to Pope Benedict XIV and
gave young men lessons in the different duties of school life, royal courts,
war and marriage. The verses cautioned boys about ambition, pretence,
excessive philosophical studies, beautiful but fraudulent women and other
potential moral dangers. In satire 3.7, however, he complained of his injured
thigh, which was first painfully operated on by doctors who created a three-
finger-wide wound, until his friend, Doctor Jacob Toyon, saved his life.
Guglielmini’s style here is documentary in its technically detailed account of
the turning point of the illness and its symptoms. The patient’s slow
recovery and his first limping steps around the sickbed after a long period
of weakness are almost touching. The poet concluded that if sick men were
wise, as ancient philosophers argued, then he preferred to remain ignorant
rather than cough with Seneca and ache with Plato.

Money and Virtuous Poverty

Satirical arguments stressed that virtue should be valued above riches and
other favours of fortune, and the wise man should not allow worldly
success to disturb his freedom and tranquillity. This satirical and philo-
sophical topos was eagerly adopted by Lutheran satirists: for them, the
unhealthy greed for gain threatened the purity of the soul. Eilert Lübben
argued in his first satire that while neglecting the example of Christ men
had ‘pious feelings only towards wealth and honours’ (nisi opes et honores
incutiant pietatem).56 Lawyers, for instance, created conflicts instead of
resolving them, and judged according to the payment received, rather than
truth. The world was unjust and no punishment was severe enough to
match the current crimes:

55
Nomi 1703: 84 (Sat. 6). 56
Lubinus 1618: A4v (Sat. 1).
160 sari kivistö
Quae rota, quae furiae, quod saxum sufficit illis,
Qui solem exstinguunt nil dignum luce gerentes?57
Where to find such wheels of torture, furies or a rock of Prometheus that would
sufficiently punish wrongdoers who quench the sun and whose activities shun
the daylight?
The rich ‘took pleasure in the sweat and blood of farm workers, devouring
their living bones and sucking the marrows’;58 the poor were forced to live
a life that was worse than that of dogs. Rich men, busy piling up money,
had forgotten the shared origin of all humans in nature and in Adam, and
were heedless of the vanity of human effort:
Non satis est nummos et opes cumulare superbas,
Non satis immensam molem aedificare domorum,
Quae nubi, atque ipsi minitentur acumine caelo,
Tot villas et agros, quantum nec milvus oberret.
Vitae summa brevis, vah! quam cito praeterit huius!59
(Greedy men) are not content to accumulate money or proud wealth;
they are not content to build an immense block of houses
that rises to the clouds and threatens the sky or to own
so many villas and fields that not even a hawk could cross them.
Yet life is so short, oh! How quickly all will perish!
Many contemporary religious critics contrasted magnificent worldly
monuments with the endurance of true glory, which had no need of
gigantic, marble memorials. Havre questioned the value of riches and
palaces covered in gold and marble, since such monuments collapsed
and perished in time, whereas the value of virtue remained eternal.60 In
the manner of Roman moralists Naogeorg also denounced the wealthy
man who builds impressive private palaces with extensive gardens and
birdhouses to satisfy his private pleasures, but never gives money to the
poor. In their blindness the rich ‘never raise their eyes to the heaven and
the stars’.61 Guglielmini, for his part, counselled that, instead of serving
their private whims, wealthy men should support the public arts, architec-
ture and sculpture, invoking the example of Pope Clement XII, a generous
patron of artists and the great restorer of Rome.62
In Roman verse satire virtue was based on simple living in the country-
side, considered the ‘virtuous milieu’ of the Roman past. Horace in

57
Lubinus 1618: A5v (Sat. 1). 58
Lubinus 1618: A6 (Sat. 1). 59
Lubinus 1618: A7v (Sat. 1).
60 61
Havraeus 1627: 48 (Sat. 3). Naogeorg 4.3; 1555: 168.
62
Guglielmini 1742, Sat. 1.8. On the criticism of (poetic) monuments in neo-Latin literature, see
Kivistö 2014.
 Verse Satire 161
particular praised the virtues of plain living and the wise peasant Ofellus in
his satire 2.2. Likewise, neo-Latin writers sang the praises of poverty and
rural life and, like Horace, identified with simple peasants innocent of the
corruption of the city. In his third satire Federigo Nomi called himself, his
father and his whole ancestry ‘poor fellows’, who had been nourished by
mere virtue and love.63 His fourth dramatic satire dealt with an inordinate
desire for profit, and his thirteenth defended the ideal of the Horatian
vivere parvo (Sat. 2.2.1), the capacity to live content with little. Nomi
revived the Juvenalian theme of fleeing the corrupted city (Quid Romae
faciam? ‘What can I do at Rome?’),64 overrun by flatterers who knew how
to advance their positions by lying. The same emphasis on frugal living is
discerned in Nomi’s fifteenth satire, which, indebted again to classical
models (such as Horace’s satires 2.2 and 2.8, and Juvenal’s satire 5),
censured luxurious meals and exotic ingredients imported from abroad;
he noted disapprovingly that no one appreciated a simple portion of meat
that looked like meat unless it was served in some imaginative and
unidentifiable form. Nomi’s most bitter objurgations in satires five and
fourteen were directed against corrupt law courts, where justice depended
on wealth. Nomi’s ninth, dramatic satire on traitors and simulators, who
concealed their true nature, just as prostitutes smeared their ugly faces with
cosmetics, was dedicated to his friend G. W. Leibniz. Nomi addressed all
his satires to the intellectual elite of his age, thereby emphasizing that his
poetry reflected the tastes of the European intelligentsia. One of the most
interesting pieces in Nomi’s satires is the tenth poem, which sketched the
horrors of war: trenches flooded with blood, bombs destroying whole
towns and the reckless waste of young soldiers’ lives.
The moral excellence of the countryside was also conveyed as a counter-
example to the wicked urban life by Petrus Scholirius.65 His satire 1.4 was
devoted to a longing for the quiet and peaceful life in his remote farm-
house, far away from the treacherous inhabitants of the city. The Croatian
‘Horace’, Džono Rastic (Junije Restić; Junius Restius, 1755–1814), who
wrote twenty-five satires (in Carmina, 1816), offered a more realistic image
of farm conditions.66 In his seventh satire he playfully wondered why,
despite his vast reading of agricultural literature, the cabbages and turnips,
which in the ancient tradition stood for moral purity, failed to grow, and
why his long-anticipated life of virtuous farming was turning into a
nightmare. This acknowledgement of the capriciousness of agricultural life
with uncertain harvests and bad weather ironized the earlier satirical
63 64 65 66
Nomi 1703: 31 (Sat. 3). Juv. 3.41. Scholirius 1683. Restius 1816: 1–170.
162 sari kivistö
idealization of the rustic past, and functions, in fact, as a satirical comment
upon a trope of satire itself.

Conclusion
Much neo-Latin satire is traditional in its themes and complaints, inherit-
ing from the classical and medieval Latin satirists a preoccupation with
greed, luxury and the corruption of power, as well as a marked interest in
the poetics of satire and satirical freedom. Philosophical attitudes rooted in
classical material were combined with Christianity, both thematically and
in allusive blends of classical and Biblical material; and while no themes
may be said to be entirely new, the religious upheavals of the Reformation
and Counter-Reformation prompted particularly large quantities of satiric
verse, and the social prominence of doctors and lawyers made them,
alongside prominent clergymen, particular targets for satirical attack.

F U R T H E R RE A D IN G
A good overview of the history of neo Latin satire is Ramos 2002: 157 229; shorter
summaries are offered by IJsewijn 1976 and IJsewijn and Sacré 1998: 67 73; most
recently, see Marsh 2014b and De Smet 2015. Cian 1923 remains useful for both
medieval and humanist satire. The history of neo Latin satire in the Netherlands
has been traced by Tournoy 1998. Medical satires are discussed by Kivistö 2009.
Balde’s satires have been treated by Classen 1976, Schäfer 1976, Stroh 2004 and
several contributors in the collections of essays edited by Valentin 1986
and Freyburger and Lefèvre 2005; see also Kivistö 2014. Articles on individual
satirists include Roloff 2003 (on Naogeorg), Citroni Marchetti 1976 (on
Nomi and Sergardi) and Pepin 1994 (English translation and introduction to
Sergardi’s satires).
 chapter 10

Pastoral
Estelle Haan

Epitaphium Damonis, John Milton’s neo-Latin pastoral lament on the

premature death of his close friend, Charles Diodati,1 assumes an appro-
priate place as the culminatory piece of the Poemata in the bipartite Poems
of Mr John Milton, Both English and Latin (1645).2 Its positioning is
significant in view of the poem’s climactic articulation of a metamorphosis
that is both generic and linguistic. Thus the envisaged apotheosis of the
deceased Damon (Diodati) is mirrored intratextually by the speaker’s
enunciation of his literary plans for an epic,3 by the predicted transform-
ation of the pastoral pipe, the fistula, and by the anticipation of a Miltonic
code selection (vernacular over Latin).4 Composed in 1639 upon Milton’s
return to England after his Italian journey, the Epitaphium takes its
place alongside pastoral epicedia of friends and poets. This tradition
finds its origins in the Greek poetry of Theocritus, Bion and Moschus,5
and, not least, in Virgil’s imaginative reinvention whereby the pastoral
elegy became a polyvocal exploration of contrasting perspectives on death.
Thus, in Eclogue 5, Mopsus’ mournful dirge on the exstinctum . . . Daphnin
(‘deceased Daphnis’, 20) is both countered and counterbalanced by
Menalcas’ very different vision of the lamented subject: now candidus . . .
Daphnis (‘radiant Daphnis’, 56–7) marvels at the threshold of Olympus,
and beholds clouds and stars beneath his feet.6 Death yields to apotheosis
and to a celestial landscape that ultimately transcends pastoral rusticity.

1
On Charles Diodati, see Dorian 1950: 97–181, and The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography s.v.
2
On the 1645 volume, see among others Martz 1980: 31–59; Hale 1991; Moseley 1991; Revard 1997;
Haan 2012: 141–59.
3 4
Ep. Dam. 162–8. Ep. Dam. 168–78.
5
See among others Lambert 1976; Halperin 1983; Alpers 1996; Hubbard 1998; Paschalis 2007.
6
As noted by Coleman 1977: 166, Virgil’s ‘emphatic separation’ of candidus and Daphnis (56–7)
‘underlines the contrast with exstinctum . . . Daphnin (21)’. On the apotheosis of Daphnis, see among
others Hardie 1998: 21–2; Hubbard 1998: 97–9; Anagnostou-Laoutides 2005: 209–19; Karakasis 2011:
168–81.

163
164 estelle haan
For Christian neo-Latin poets of the Renaissance and beyond, Virgilian
polyvocalism afforded the possibility for creative experimentation. On the
one hand, the grief and solitude of the mourner, his wanderings among
lonely mountains and his sense of contemplative isolation gave birth to
what Piepho has aptly described as ‘an eremetically based pastoral world’.7
On the other hand, Virgilian apotheosis became equatable with a Christian
vision of a celestial afterlife that fused pastoral and biblical imagery. In
Renaissance Italy poets turned to neo-Latin pastoral as a means of both
lamenting and celebrating deceased relatives, friends, poets and princes:
Francesco Petrarca’s (Petrarch, 1304–74) lament in Eclogue 2 on the death
of his patron, King Robert of Naples; Pontano’s Melisaeus (on his wife);
Anisio’s Melisaeus (on Pontano); Castiglione’s Alcon (on Matteo Falcone);
Basilio Zanchi’s Damon (on Castiglione), to name but a few.8 Giovanni
Boccaccio invigorated the celestial landscape by presenting it as mirroring,
yet surpassing, a pastoral world: the silva, ‘wood’, became an idealized locus
amoenus situated in Heaven itself; pastoral lambs became the Lamb of
God; pastoral shepherds were reconfigured as an angelic crew, and the
shepherd’s song was ultimately transformed into a heavenly hymn.9 In
many respects this was facilitated by medieval interpretations of Virgil’s
Eclogues, especially the ‘Messianic’ Eclogue 4, whereby the predicted birth
of a child and the associated restoration of the golden age were read in
essentially Christian terms.10 In Renaissance England too the experimental
reinterpretation of the genre came to manifest itself in a number of ways.
Mantuan’s Adulescentia, itself central to the curriculum of English schools,
epitomized how pastoral could operate on levels that went far beyond the
pedagogical. A model of Latinity understandable to most Renaissance
schoolboys could also function as a moral and religious tool.11 On a more
sophisticated level neo-Latin pastoral epicedia could serve to mourn and
commemorate recently deceased poets and friends. The death of Sir Philip
Sidney inspired neo-Latin pastoral laments by Thomas Watson and William
Gager, among others,12 while the passing of Sir Francis Walsingham was

7
Piepho 2006: 60.
8
On Anisio’s Melisaeus, see Vecce 1998; on Castiglione’s Alcon, see Harrison 1935; on Zanchi’s
Damon, see Ryan 1981.
9
See Boccaccio, Bucolicum Carmen 14 (Olympia), especially 170–96; 200–26. As noted by Minnis
2016: 177, Boccaccio seems to push the conventions of Latin pastoral ‘to breaking point’. He does
so, however, with skilful creativity. See among others Finlayson 1983; Carlson 1987c; Chiecchi 1995;
Lummus 2013.
10
See among others Mayor, Conway and Fowler 1907; Benko 1980; Clausen 1990; Van Sickle 1992;
Kallendorf 2015: 49–58. See also Marsh 2014a: 430.
11 12
See Piepho 1993, 1994, 2001; Haan 1998b. See Baker-Smith 1986.
 Pastoral 165
the subject of Thomas Watson’s Meliboeus. It is a tradition that is perhaps
most capably represented by Milton’s Epitaphium itself.
The Epitaphium’s imaginative reinvention of Theocritean and Virgilian
pastoral has been illustrated by Campbell, Knedlik, Hardie and Moul.13
Likewise, the poem has been analysed by Hale in terms of Milton’s
language-choice, and by Haan in relation to his bilingual and bicultural
self-fashioning.14 But substantial discussion of its situation within an
Italianate neo-Latin pastoral tradition is notably lacking.15 This chapter
uses Milton’s poem, and its intertextual dialogue with Petrarch’s Bucolicum
Carmen in particular, to explore some key themes of the genre as a whole:
the alluring attractions of landscape versus the perennial plight of individ-
ual solitude; pastoral displacement and the ambivalent status of subsequent
wanderings; transgressions across and beyond the pastoral limen (threshold),
the shattering of pastoral landscape; pastoral memory and commemoration;
apotheosis and the afterlife. It argues that at the heart of the Epitaphium –
and of the poem’s engagement with the genre of neo-Latin pastoral – lies a
Petrarchan self-fashioning, which is achieved by a sustained engagement
with Petrarchan eremitic pastoral (and its explication), and by Milton’s
subtle, though hitherto unnoticed, development of monastic themes con-
tained therein.

Pastoral Peregrinations and the Wandering Scholar

In a letter to the Florentine academician Benedetto Buonmattei (Florence,
31 August/10 September 1638) Milton announces that his literary interests,
far from being confined to the classics, include illum Dantem et Petrarcham
aliosque vestros complusculos (‘that Dante of yours and Petrarch, and several
others as well’).16 Prior to his Italian journey he had undertaken a vast

13
Campbell 1984; Knedlik 1984; Hardie 2007; Moul 2006.
14
Hale 1997: 57–61; Haan 2012: 132–9.
15
Harrison 1935 and Ryan 1981 suggest, in a rather limited way, links with Castiglione’s Alcon, and
Zanchi’s Damon respectively, while Revard 2012 examines, only in general terms, the poem’s
potential engagement with neo-Latin poetry. Studies of the poetic influence of one neo-Latin
work upon others are in general severely lacking. The strong Italian history of the genre is
particularly significant given Diodati’s Anglo-Italian heritage (see Dorian 1950: 3–22), mentioned
in the headnote to the poem, and the fact that Milton was travelling through Italy at the time of
Diodati’s death (see Ep. Dam. 113–23).
16
Epistolae familiares 8, printed in Milton 1674: 23. All quotations from Milton’s letters are from this
edition. I have modernized spelling and punctuation. All translations of Latin, both here and
elsewhere, are mine. On Buonmattei, see Cinquemani 1998. On Milton’s Latin letter to
Buonmattei, see Haan 2012: 104–18.
166 estelle haan
reading programme in Italian literature and history.17 This was doubtlessly
intensified by his sojourns in Florence, Rome, and Naples, where he
attended academies, visited libraries, inspected manuscripts, purchased
books, and was the recipient of literary gifts of recent publications by his
Italian academic hosts.18 Latin and Italian tributes composed in his honour
present him as a quasi-Petrarchan poet laureate, who is first and foremost a
wandering scholar, immersed in reading and in erudite investigation.19
Wandering, on both a literary and metaphorical level, possessed a
multiplicity of meanings for the Latin pastoral poet. In Virgil’s Eclogues,
for example, it can signal an aspiration to obtain a means of security or
salvation that lay beyond the confines of the pastoral world,20 or it might
indicate various types of displacement and consequential disorder.21 This
multiplicity is itself replicated and reinterpreted by neo-Latin pastoral
poets. Thus for Petrarch the shepherd roaming in solitude comes to
symbolize both the wandering scholar and a quasi-monastic quest for
self-fulfilment. For Boccaccio ‘the wanderer becomes a dead man’,22 the
ghostly Lycidas, describing, in Bucolicum Carmen 10, the darkness of a very
anti-pastoral Orcus, to which he has been driven.23 For Mantuan the
wanderer is the object of censure by the Virgin Mary herself, rebuked
for his peregrinations (Ecl. 7.93–4), and conducted to a new pastoral
landscape, which looks towards the Judaeo-Christian tradition that placed
the earthly paradise on a high mountain.24 And in Sannazaro’s transform-
ation of pastoral landscape into a Neapolitan seascape, the wandering
shepherd becomes the fisherman, whose grief causes him to traverse the
waters of the deep (Pisc. 1.72–3), or whose contemplation of foreign travel

17
In a letter to Charles Diodati (23 November 1637: on the dating, see Campbell 1997: 57–8) he
proclaims: Italorum in obscura re diu versati sumus (‘I have for a long time been busying myself in the
obscure affairs of the Italians’, Epistolae familiares 7, in Milton 1674: 20).
18
See Haan 1998a: passim; Di Cesare 1991: passim.
19
Petrarch was crowned poet laureate in Rome in 1341. For Giovanni Salzilli of Rome Milton merits
coronation with a triple laurel of poetry (that is, in Latin, Greek and Tuscan). Likewise the
Florentine Antonio Francini vows to weave a crown of stars (‘di stelle intreccierò corona’, 2) in
his honour. Milton would prefix these (along with encomia by three other Italian academicians) to
the 1645 Poemata. A Latin prose encomium by the Florentine Carlo Dati depicts Milton as a novus
Ulysses (‘a modern Ulysses’), undertaking a metaphorical itinerary into scholarship itself. All
quotations are from Lewalski and Haan 2014. Spelling and punctuation have been modernized.
20
Thus Tityrus in Ecl. 1.19–25 describes his visiting Rome, and sings the praises of that city.
21
See in particular Ecl. 6: animals roaming the mountains (40), the wandering Pasiphae (52), the tracks
of the wandering bull (58), on which see among others Elder 1961: 118–19; Leach 1974: 28–9; Segal
1981: 321.
22 23
Hubbard 1998: 238. See Boccaccio, Buc. Carm. 10. 76–104.
24
See Giamatti 1966: 44–5; Duncan 1972: 79–80; Piepho 2006: 60–4.
 Pastoral 167
to the most extreme regions is met with a stark self-awareness: his sick
mind will follow him wherever he roams (Pisc. 2.61–70).25
But it is perhaps in Petrarch’s Bucolicum Carmen that the potential
dichotomy between wandering and pastoral security is most vividly
conveyed. Here the allurements of the world of letters are set against the
attractions of the pastoral landscape, itself now equated with a monastic
life.26 Petrarch moreover juxtaposes pastoral solitude and self-scrutiny in a
manner describable as Augustinian, while also striking a contrast between
the monastic and poetic callings.27 The conceptual framework of the
collection is thus ‘firmly rooted in a medieval worldview’,28 its method-
ology both Augustinian and monastic. Nonetheless the opening Eclogue
seems to call that worldview into question. The poem reconfigures in
allegorical terms a dialogue between Petrarch (Silvius) and his brother
Gherardo (Monicus), whose monastic withdrawal (in 1343) to an antrum
(the Charterhouse of Montrieux) ‘heightened Petrarch’s internal tensions
and initiated a decade of serious inner debate about his own vocation’.29
As Carrai notes, ‘the theme of monasticism that dominates the first eclogue
sets the tone for the rest of the volume’.30 The poem’s allegory is meticu-
lously unravelled by Petrarch in a Latin letter to his brother (Ep. Fam. 10. 4
[c. 1346]), a fraternal and essentially scholarly ‘key’, which not only
emulates medieval explications of Virgil’s pastoral allegory (by, for
example, Fulgentius and Silvestris), but also anticipates the rich tradition
of humanistic commentary that would come to characterize the complex
literary reception of his own Bucolicum Carmen (most notably represented
by Benvenuto Rambaldi of Imola).31 Petrarch’s poem inverts the contrast
in Virgil, Eclogue 1 between Tityrus, a wandering shepherd, and the
sedentary Meliboeus secluded in pastoral otium.32 For now it is Moni-
cus/Tityrus/Gherardo who has found contentment in the tacit security
afforded by his monastic calling, and who extends an invitation to the
wandering (yet wondering) Silvius/Meliboeus/Petrarch to cross the

25
For neo-Latin pastoral in a piscatorial setting, see also the Scottish poet John Leech, one of whose
Idyllia is piscatorial, and Phineas Fletcher, Eclogue 3. See Piepho 1984; Smith 2002; Haan 2015: 433.
26
See Bergin 1974: xii.
27
See Zak 2010: 22 and Constable 1980. On Petrarch’s humanism and monastic spirituality see
Mazzotta 1993: 102–28.
28 29 30
Carrai 2009: 169. Witt 2000: 251. Carrai 2009: 169.
31
Contrast Milton’s Latin letter to Carlo Dati (Ep. Fam. 10, 30), which simply alludes to (without
explicating) the Epitaphium’s allegorical representation of Italian academic life. For medieval
explications of Virgil as allegory, see Baswell 1995; Wilson-Okamura 2010; Skoie and Velázquez
2006. On humanist commentary on Petrarch himself, see Avena 1906; Kennedy 2002.
32
See Lord 1982.
168 estelle haan
threshold (limen) of conversion.33 But to no avail: for Silvius’ vocation is a
quest for literary fama, which has led to the peregrinations that characterize
his exile. Patterson observes the poem’s ‘rewriting of Virgil’s first eclogue in
terms of a choice between secular and spiritual writing’.34 This reaches
a climax in Silvius’ articulation of his literary plans, namely the compos-
ition of an epic. The traditional aemulatio between competing shepherds
becomes a contest between a humanistic vita activa and the ascesis of
monastic contemplation.
Petrarch’s first Eclogue and the associated Latin letter assume a hith-
erto unnoticed place within the rich intertextual tapestry of Milton’s neo-
Latin pastoral. Importantly, Petrarch highlights not only the literary
wanderings of Silvius (pererro (3), ‘I wander about’; per deserta vagari
(9), ‘to roam through the wilderness’), but also their motivation.35 Thus,
in response to Monicus’ question: quis te stimulus, que cura perurget
(‘what is the spur, what is the zeal that drives you on?’, 111), he empha-
sizes ‘love of the Muse’ (amor Muse, 112) as his driving force.36 Peregrin-
ation, the poet’s love of the Muse, and consequential dislocation are
inextricably interconnected. Thyrsis/Milton explicates the motivation for
his travels in similar terms: pastorem scilicet illum / dulcis amor Musae
Thusca retinebat in urbe (‘indeed love of the sweet Muse detained that
shepherd in a Tuscan city’, Ep. Dam. 12–13). And for Petrarch and
Milton alike, wanderings, both literary and literal, serve to highlight
the exilic status of the humanist scholar. Petrarch points out that the
deserta in which Silvius wanders symbolize literary study, and emphasizes
the contrast between Silvius’ vagus error (‘labyrinthine wandering’), and
Monicus’ certa sedes (‘fixed abode’).37 Milton’s Thyrsis, an isolated
mourner traversing solitary regions (8; 58), offers Damon (28–9) the
fulfilment of that spes sepulchri (‘hope of a tomb’) pronounced by Silvius.
He too contrasts such certainties (haec tibi certa manent (‘these [honours]
remain fixed for you’, 36) with his own uncertain future: at mihi quid
tandem fiet modo? (‘but what, I ask, is to become of me?’, 37). And later

33
The cloister as pastoral enclosure was a well-established motif in patristic sources. See Mazzotta
1993: 158.
34 35
Patterson 1987: 47. All quotations are from Bergin 1974.
36
This is glossed in Petrarch’s letter as: cui respondet Silvius erroris causam esse amorem, et amorem muse,
non alium (‘to whom Silvius replies that the reason for his wandering is love, and love of the Muse,
not of another’). All quotations from Petrarch’s Latin letters are from Rossi 1933–42.
37
tibi enim iam certa sedes eoque certior ‘spes sepulcri’; michi autem adhuc vagus error et incerta omnia
(‘for you already possess a fixed abode and a “hope of a tomb” that is all the more assured on that
account; but for me there is still labyrinthine wandering and all types of uncertainty’).
 Pastoral 169
he asks: heu quis me ignotas traxit vagus error in oras (‘alas, what labyrin-
thine wandering drew me to travel to unknown shores’, 113).
Despite that sense of dislocation, both Silvius and Thyrsis convey the
benefits that accrue from literary vagaries, and in both instances the
pastoral landscape becomes an allegory of literary performance.38 Silvius
has been travelling among fontes . . . sonantes (‘babbling springs’, 10)
glossed as litterati et eloquentes homines (‘erudite and eloquent men’),
and boasts that his singing was applauded by a spring: ibi fons michi sepe
canenti / Plaudit (‘there, as I frequently sang, the spring applauded me’,
34–5) glossed as studiosorum chorus (‘the band of scholars’). Thyrsis too
has assumed a not insignificant place by a river, the Arno (129–30). And
his attempted song (133) has likewise met with the applause of literati.39
That applause, allegorized here as baskets, bowls and pastoral pipes
(135),40 constitutes in effect those ‘written encomiums’, the testimonia
gifted to him by Italian academicians, and later prefixed to the 1645
Poemata. In a headnote Milton, proffering perhaps an authorial ‘key’ to
the allegory, glosses these objects as the praise proclaimed by praeclaro
ingenio viri (‘men of outstanding genius’). Baskets, or the weaving of
baskets as allegories for the composition of poetry, derives ultimately
from Virgil (Ecl. 10.70–1), and is a common feature of neo-Latin pastoral,
found in such diverse predecessors of Milton as Mantuan (Ecl. 1.22) and
the Englishman Thomas Watson (Amyntae Querula 4.30).
Petrarch’s amor Muse is a vocational commitment to complete an
epic (the Africa) already tentatively begun (pavitans . . . cepi / Texere:
tentabo ingenium (‘in a state of fear . . . I began to weave [my song]:
I will put my talent to the test’, 121–2) on Scipio Africanus the Elder.41
In Thyrsis’ case, however, tentativity (tentare, 133) is associated with
past, not future, literary performance, and ultimately yields to a confi-
dent pronouncement of a projected epic envisaged as transcending
pastoral itself. The bursting of the neo-Latin pastoral fistula (‘pipe’,
156), unable to bear the graves . . . sonos (‘deep tones’, 159) of epic, is

38
For neo-Latin pastoral as an allegory of literary performance, see Marsh 2014a: 426.
39
Milton alludes here to his performance of neo-Latin verse in a Florentine Academy. For a full
discussion see Haan 1998a: 10–28; Haan 2012: 95–104.
40
On baskets, and basket-weaving as a pastoral allegory of verse-composition, see Virgil, Ecl. 10.70–1,
on which see among others Rosenberg 1981: 19; Hubbard 1998: 138–9; Karakasis 2011: 306–7. Cf. also
Mantuan, Ecl. 1.22; Watson, Amyntae querula 4.30.
41
Cf. Petrarch, Epistolae metricae 2.16.20–2 (in Petrarch 1829–34). In fact, Petrarch did not complete
the project. His ‘trajectory from epic to eclogues’ reverses that of Virgil. See Kennedy 2002: 149.
170 estelle haan
mirrored in the epicist himself, who, while perhaps appearing turgidulus
(‘rather high-flown’, 160), boldly announces his literary project: an
Arthuriad (162–8). And this is a fistula that must (and will) cross the
limina of language itself: patriis mutata camoenis (‘transformed by native
muses’, 170).42

Pastoral and Monastic Liminality

Although Thyrsis, like Silvius, does not cross that monastic limen, the
Epitaphium (like Petrarch’s Bucolicum Carmen) seems to do so on
several occasions. This is achieved in a number of ways, not least by
wordplay on Diodati’s divinum nomen (‘divine name’, 210).43 In the
closing lines of the Epitaphium the ‘divine name’ (210) is one by which
the ‘heaven-dwellers’ (211) will know Damon. In all of this, Diodati, it
might be argued, is equatable with a certain Sanctus Deodatus (born c.
590, Bishop of Nevers and Abbot of St Jointures), details of whose life
are preserved in a Vita composed around the ninth or tenth century by
a monk of St Dié, and augmented in the eleventh century by a certain
Valcandus, Abbot of Mayenne.44 Milton’s possible recourse to a hagio-
graphical tradition is hardly incongruous in a poem which he arranged
to have separately printed to send to his Catholic erstwhile fellow-
academicians in Italy,45 one whose climax is facilitated by its ecphrastic
allegory (181–97) of books gifted to Milton by the staunchly Catholic
Manso,46 who had jokingly conjectured that, were it not for his reli-
gion, Milton the Protestant Anglus could be a Catholic Angelus.47 In the
Epitaphium perhaps he can. In this respect the poem functions as an
important case study of the imaginative fusion of the pastoral and the
monastic facilitated by Petrarchan precedent. Moreover, as suggested
below, Miltonic inventiveness results in what might be described as a
neo-Latin pastoral hagiography.

42
See Haan 2012: 135–9; Hale 1997: 56–61.
43
The etymological signification of the name Diodati had been highlighted in a neo-Latin epigram
(2.65) by John Owen addressed to Charles’ father, Theodore Diodati. See Martyn 1978: ii, 83.
44
See Vita Sancti Deodati Valcandi Mediani in Patrologia Latina (Migne 1841–55): 151: 605–34,
hereafter abbreviated to PL. For a fuller discussion of Milton’s appropriation of the Vita and of
his potentially Catholic self-fashioning in the Latin poetry associated with his Italian journey, see
Haan 2017.
45
See Bradner 1932; Fletcher 1962; Haan 2012: 55–6.
46
On the identification of the pocula . . . bina (181–3) as Manso’s Poesie Nomiche (1635) and Erocallia
(1628) respectively, see De Filippis 1936.
47
See Haan 1998a: 130–6; Haan 2017.
 Pastoral 171
The Vita presents Deodatus as ‘proceeding from virtue to virtue’
(de virtute in virtutem . . . eundo),48 a holy man, whose appointment as
Bishop of Nevers is a divine reward for his ‘giving of himself to God’ in
accordance with the signification of his name (a Deo [cui se dederat] iuxta
nominis sui exemplar donatus est pontificia Nivernis, ‘by God [to whom he
had given himself] in accordance with the model afforded by his own name
he was presented with the bishopric of Nevers’).49 That progression
from virtue to virtue is ironically inverted in the anguished question posed
in Epitaphium 21–2 as to where Damon’s/Diodati’s ‘virtue will go’.50
Deodatus’ founding of the monastery of Jointures was the consequence
of his resolve to live a life of solitude. It is here that he befriended the monk
Hidulphus. Both were neighbours in the desert (in eremo [ut optaverant]
vicini facti (‘in the desert they had become neighbours [as they had
wished]’), and would visit each other’s monasteries,51 staying awake
throughout the night in deep conversation.52 Conversation is central to
the Milton/Diodati friendship as depicted in the Epitaphium, a friendship
contracted by neighbours (eiusdem viciniae pastores, ‘shepherds of the same
neighbourhood’; Argumentum). Now, however, Thyrsis can only wonder
who will teach him to beguile the night’s length (46) with sweet conversa-
tion (47). And his consequential solitude (58) and traversal of lonely places
(8; 58) seem quasi-eremitic in essence. Eventually, in his latter years
Deodatus left his abbey at St Jointures and retired to another monastery,
where he became mortally ill. The Vita describes how Hidulphus was
warned in a divine vision to hasten to his friend’s bedside, to confer on him
the last rites, to close his eyes in death, and to see to his funeral.53 Thyrsis,
by contrast, far from receiving a divine dream-vision, has been indulging in
idle daydreams about the pastoral activities of his already deceased friend
(143–6). Hidulphus found Deodatus adhuc vivum (‘still alive’), who in turn

48 49
PL 151: 612. PL 151: 612.
50
tua sic sine nomine virtus / ibit, et obscuris numero sociabitur umbris? (‘is this how your virtue will pass
away without a name and be united to the company of the unknown shades?’, 21–2). Cf. nam quo
tua candida virtus? (‘for to where would your innocent virtue go?’, 200).
51
PL 151: 624.
52
PL 151: 624: quibus . . . maxima iucunditas esset simul semper conversari . . . et [noctem] insomnes totam
in sanctis colloquiis et divinis laudibus solebant expendere (‘whose greatest delight it was to be forever
engaged in conversation . . . and they were accustomed to spend the whole night without sleep in
holy conversations and divine praises’).
53
See PL 151: 627, especially: os et oculos, manus et pedes eius rite componeret, funus eius, debita
veneratione procuratum, deduceret, atque in sepulcro cautissime collocaret (‘that he should duly tend
to his face and eyes, his hands and his feet, arrange and conduct his funeral with due veneration, and
place him with the greatest care in a tomb’).
172 estelle haan
rejoiced in God for revealing his imminent death to his friend, and
deigning that he should see to his funeral.54 While Hidulphus was present
at Deodatus’ bedside to bid his final farewell, to hold his hand, to close his
eyes in death, and to beg him to remember him, Thyrsis was significantly
absent, thereby failing on precisely all four counts:
Ah certe extremum licuisset tangere dextram,
et bene compositos placide morientis ocellos,
et dixisse, ‘Vale! nostri memor ibis ad astra’.
(121 3)

Ah, at least if I could have been permitted to touch your right hand for the last
time and gently close your eyes as you peacefully died, and could have said
‘farewell: remember me as you journey to the stars’.
Here Milton artfully blends details from the Vita with elements of neo-Latin
pastoral elegy, perhaps especially Castiglione’s Alcon 83–6, in which Iolas
grieves at the anger of the gods which dragged him away from Mantua,
thereby preventing him from ‘closing’ the ‘dying eyes’ of his friend, and
from catching his last breath in a kiss.55
The Vita also records Deodatus’ final request that Hidulphus look
after his flock.56 This he would indeed fulfil, publicly praying over his
dear friend’s body as it was committed to the earth.57 But Thyrsis can
only profess his neglect of his oves (66–7) forcefully signalled in the
poem’s pulsating refrain: ite domum impasti, domino iam non vacat, agni
(‘Go home unfed, lambs, your master has no time for you now’). The
stark nec dum aderat Thyrsis (‘and Thyrsis was not yet present’, 12) is the
antithesis of Hidulphus’ privileged presence. Unable to see to the burial
of his friend, Milton, like the Virgilian Tityrus (Ecl. 1. 19–25), has been
visiting Rome. His poignant question Ecquid erat tanti Romam vidisse
sepultam? (‘Was it worth so much to have seen buried Rome?’, Ep.
Dam. 115) echoes Meliboeus’ question posed to Tityrus at Ecl. 1.26: Et
quae tanta fuit Romam tibi causa videndi? (‘And what was the reason so
great for your seeing Rome?’), only to add the pejorative sepultam
(‘buried’), and to apply the whole to his own self-scrutiny. His sight-
seeing has taken place among the ruins of a now buried city,58 an
antiquated metropolitan substitute for the human burial which he
missed.

54 55 56 57
PL 151: 627. See Harrison 1935: 481–2. PL 151: 627. PL 151: 628.
58
Cf. Castiglione, Alcon 123, in which Iolas describes the beauties of Rome as antiquas . . . ruinas
(‘ancient ruins’).
 Pastoral 173

Silva Fracta: Shattered Pastoral

For Thyrsis/Milton a profound sense of loss and solitude seems to prevail.
This is symbolized by the silva . . . fracta (‘shattered wood’) to which he has
returned, a wood torn apart by a twilight storm intensified by rain and a
howling East wind:
Hic serum expecto, supra caput imber et Eurus
Triste sonant, fractaeque agitata crepuscula silvae.
(60 1)
Here I await evening; overhead is the grim sound of showers and the East wind,
and the disturbed twilight of a shattered wood.
Once again, this aspect of Milton’s poem responds to and summarizes not
only the Virgilian, but also the neo-Latin, pastoral tradition. The potential
destruction of pastoral landscape features prominently in Virgil’s Eclogues.
Among the many causes are contagion (Ecl. 1.49–50), dispossession by
a foreign invader (Ecl. 1.70–2; 9.2–4), weeds (Ecl. 5.36–9) and drought.59
For the neo-Latin pastoral poet the shattered landscape came to symbolize
a myriad of contemporary (or near contemporary) disorders: a city
(Naples) fallen to a foreign conqueror, as in Boccaccio, Bucolicum Carmen
5: Silva cadens (‘The Falling Forest’)60 or the devastating effects of a
volcanic eruption, as in Sannazaro, Piscatoria 4.61 For Petrarch, as for
Milton, it epitomizes an absent, destroyed world to which the wandering
scholar returns. In both instances, succumbing to the allurements of
scholarship comes not without cost. Petrarch’s metaphorical journey into
ostentatious erudition, his literary peregrinations among unknown shores,
occur to the detriment of a forsaken laurel tree, broken and uprooted by a
storm – its leaves scattered in a silva now shattered. More specifically, the
silva broken by the Eurus is central to Petrarch’s tenth Bucolicum Carmen,
the Laurea Occidens. Here Petrarch as Silvanus describes to Socrates (Ludwig
van Kempen) his dislocation from Florence,62 and his quasi-Odyssean

59
See Ecl. 7.57–8.
60
See Boccaccio, Bucolicum Carmen 5. 77–119, especially Delapse quercus, grandes cecidere cupressus
(‘the oak trees have collapsed, the mighty cypresses have fallen’, 78) and Silva decus nostrum periit
(‘the wood, our source of glory, has perished’, 117).
61
See Sannazaro, Pisc. 4. 77–8: aut ut terrifici sonitus ignemque Vesevi / et desolatas passim defleverit urbes
(‘or how he [Proteus] wept over the sounds and the fire of terrifying Vesuvius, and towns lying
desolate in every region’). On Sannazaro and the pastoral tradition, see Kennedy 1983; Hubbard
2007.
62
tusco translatus ab Arno (‘transported from the Tuscan Arno’, 14). All quotations are from Martellotti
1968.
174 estelle haan
wanderings among some one hundred and twenty ancient writers:63 his
journey to Latium (44), his crossing of the limina Romae (‘thresholds of
Rome’, 222), and his itinerary amid an Etrurian landscape (327). Silvanus’
renunciation of all temporal concerns results in a ‘state of suspended
ambivalence’,64 which, however, enhances his poetic potential for self-
reflection. But once again this comes at a cost: he has had to abandon a
laurel tree, to which he had become devoted. As the poem nears its
conclusion he describes how during an absence motivated by a desire to
behold ‘ancient woods’ (forte aberam, silvasque ieram spectare vetustas (‘by
chance I was absent, and had gone to look at ancient woods’, 380) his laurel
was uprooted by the plague-bearing East and South winds, its branches
destroyed, its foliage dissipated.
pestifer hinc eurus, hinc humidus irruit auster;
ac, stratis late arboribus, mea gaudia laurum
extirpant franguntque truces, terreque cavernis
brachia ramorum, frondesque tulere comantes.
(381 4)
On one side the plague bearing East wind; on the other, the humid South wind
unleashes its attack, and laying low trees all about, they uproot the laurel, my joy,
and fiercely smash it, and they bury the branches and leafy foliage in the caverns
of the earth.

Silvanus/Petrarch as an exiled Meliboeus has had to pay a price for his

literary and archaeological antiquarianism.65 The laurel tree punningly yet
poignantly symbolizes Laura, whose death from plague in April 1348 (here
allegorized as a storm and more specifically as the Eurus and Auster) had
occurred while Petrarch was travelling through Italy.66 If, as Gordon
Campbell suggests, Diodati died as a consequence of plague (his family
buried three of its members in mid-1638),67 the potentially Petrarchan
subtext of the Epitaphium may assume additional significance.68 Has not

63 64
Bergin 1974: xii and Patterson 1987: 49. Kennedy 2002: 150.
65
Patterson 1987: 43 (on Petrarch’s notes in his manuscript of Virgil) notes the ‘crucial translatio to his
own circumstances of the opening lines of Virgil’s first eclogue’.
66
Cf. also Petrarch, Bucolicum Carmen 11, a lament for Laura (as Galatea). The allegory of plague as
storm pervades Petrarch, Bucolicum Carmen 9. Cf. also Ep. Met. 1.14.20–2. On the role of the laurel
in Petrarch’s self-fashioning in his Italian poetry, see Gensini 1980; Freccero 1986. On the
symbolism of the uprooting of a tree, cf. Sannazaro, Arcadia 12, in which the destruction of an
orange tree and the subsequent scattering of its leaves and fruit are symbolic of the fate of the house
of Aragon.
67
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography s.v. Diodati, Charles.
68
In England stark precedent for the incorporation of human plague into neo-Latin pastoral was
afforded by William Hawkins’ Pestifugium (1630).
 Pastoral 175
Milton too lost his Laura?69 It is ironic too that Gherardo’s survival from
the plague and his spiritual resilience in the face of such a calamity were
explicitly praised by Petrarch in Ep. Fam. 16.2. When warned by his
superior that if he remained in his monastery he might lack a sepulchrum,
Gherardo responded that that was the last of his worries. Petrarch lauds his
brother as one among holy men whose bona valetudo animi (‘sound mental
health’) has served to protect his valetudo corporis (‘bodily health’). Not so
for Laura or indeed for Charles Diodati.

Tuscus tu quoque: Commemoration and Pastoral Cryptogram

Silvanus’ literary itinerary and its tragic aftermath lead to a heightened
sense of dislocation (Hei michi! Quo nunc fessus eam? (‘Woe is me! Where
am I now to go, exhausted as I am?’, 385)) as he wonders where will he now
find a locus amoenus in which to sing new poetry (385–6). Of particular
note is his ensuing comment: Illic notus eram; quo nunc vagus orbe requirar?
(‘There I was known; now, as I wander, in what part of the world will I be
needed?’, 387), followed by the ironic question posed to Socrates: An
ignotas fugies moriturus in oras? (‘or will you flee to unknown shores only
to die?’, 392). The Epitaphium is likewise concerned with things known
and unknown, named and unnamed. Thus the sine nomine virtus (‘name-
less virtue’, 21) of a Diodati initially envisaged as bereft of celestial reward is
countered by the acclaimed nomina (‘names’) of Milton (and perhaps
Diodati too) that the Florentine Carlo Dati and Antonio Francini have
taught their beech trees (136).70 As if in response to Silvanus’ question,
Thyrsis/Milton has indeed travelled to unknown shores (ignotas . . . in oras,
113); his proposed recourse to the vernacular henceforth may perhaps
render him ignotus (‘unknown’, 173) and inglorius (‘without glory’, 174)
as though plunged into a linguistic obscurity matching the obscurae . . .
umbrae (‘unknown shades’, 22) into which Damon is initially imagined
to descend.

69
For a useful, albeit exaggerated, reading of the potential homoeroticism of the Milton/Diodati
relationship, see Shawcross 1975. Diodati, addressee of his fourth and quintessentially Petrarchan
Italian sonnet, may be more closely linked to Milton’s Italian sonnet sequence than previously
thought. Shaw and Giamatti 1970: 373 describe Milton’s ‘mastery of the language’ as ‘amazing’. On
the Italian sonnets see Smart 1921; Baldi 1966; Shawcross 1967. Campbell and Corns 2008: 49 note
that Diodati was part of London’s small Protestant Italian community in Cheapside. It is not
impossible that Milton’s Italian sonnet sequence and his increased proficiency in the Italian
language are linked to that community and to Diodati in particular.
70
See Haan 2012: 103, 132–4.
176 estelle haan
Petrarch as Silvanus encounters a series of now lost authors. As
Godman notes, ‘his theme is forgetfulness’.71 They are forgotten because
their work has not survived. The theme of the forgotten song is perhaps
most notably represented by Virgil’s ninth Eclogue: in Moeris’ admission:
numeros memini, si verba tenerem (‘I remember the rhythms; if only I had
hold of the words’, 45), and especially in his later confession: nunc oblita
mihi tot carmina (‘now I have forgotten so many songs’, 53).72 The whole
results in a pastoral exchange which constitutes, in the words of Breed
‘deracinated fragments. Incompleteness is everywhere.’73 Incompleteness
is also the case in Silvanus’ list of forgotten authors. Some are named;
others are alluded to only enigmatically via a cryptogrammatic method-
ology which inspired both Poliziano’s criticism (in the Nutricia) and
Boccaccio’s imitation.74 As Patterson notes, ‘the reader [is] required to
make informed guesses about what else [is] being said’.75 A similar point
could be made about the Epitaphium, which names Dati, Francini (137)
and Manso (181–2) while also incorporating possible allusions to uniden-
tifiable Italian literati and/or academicians (hic Charis atque Lepos (‘here
were Grace and Charm’, 127); Lycidae certantem . . . Menalcam (‘Menalcas
competing with Lycidas’, 132), and potential cryptograms among those
‘few emblematic little verses’ (in all likelihood lines 125–38) mentioned
but not explained by Milton in his Latin letter to Dati.76
Promises of memorialization are a traditional pastoral means of ensur-
ing that the deceased will not be ignotus. The theme finds classical
precedent in Virgil, Ecl. 5.65–80: Menalcas’ pledge to honour the dead
Daphnis. Castiglione’s Alcon provides an interesting neo-Latin parallel,
although there are important differences between that poem and Milton’s
Epitaphium. In the Alcon the speaker’s promise to build a monument for
his deceased poet and friend occurs at the end of the poem (139–54) as
the ultimate consolation for his grief. In Milton, however, this becomes
the very first attempt at consolatio, one which in itself proves ineffectual,
and which will in turn be both echoed in, and displaced by, the subse-
quent progression of the poem to its ecstatic culmination in resurrection

71 72
Godman 1998: 73. On forgotten pastoral songs, see Hardy 1990; Breed 2006: 1–24.
73
Breed 2006: 18.
74
Grant 1965a: 86 describes Petrarch’s Bucolicum Carmen as ‘mystifyingly allegorical and cryptic
pastorals of symbolism’. See also Marsh 2014a: 428. On the Nutricia see Godman 1998: 72–4; on
Boccacio see Grant 1965a: 86–110.
75
Patterson 1987: 44.
76
On the use of Greek shepherd names ‘as masks for contemporary figures’, see Marsh 2014a: 427.
 Pastoral 177
motifs. Here, as elsewhere Milton’s poem works by absorbing and outdo-
ing not only Virgil, but also his own neo-Latin pastoral precursors. The
important pastoral promise made by Milton as Thyrsis (28–34) is thus
essentially proleptic: Damon will not moulder unwept; rather, his honour
will endure and flourish among shepherds. He will assume an appropriate
place among the Italian literati who will not be forgotten (vestri nunquam
meminisse pigebit / pastores Tusci (‘I shall never grow tired of your
memory, Tuscan shepherds’, 125–6) since Tuscus tu quoque Damon
(‘you too Damon were Tuscan’, 127). The phraseology anticipates his
final abode among the heaven-dwellers: tu quoque in his certe es (‘you too
are certainly among these’, 199), a celestial shepherd laureate, his head
garlanded with a shining crown (215–16). Identifiable among Petrarch’s
long catalogue of lost authors is a certain Tuscus, poet and contemporary
of Ovid, periphrastically described as Phillida qui querulam [canit] (‘who
[sings] of the lamenting Phyllis’, 264). The allusion is to Ovid, Ex Pont.
4.16.20: quique sua nomen Phyllida Tuscus habet.77 Hollis glosses nomen ...
habet in two senses: ‘has won glory’; ‘has taken his pseudonym’, adding
that Tuscus ‘was probably the poet’s real name’.78 The context is the
posthumous commemoration of Ovid himself by the power of fama and
of memory.79 Worthy of comparison is Poliziano, Silvae 4.535–7, in
which he refers to those contemporaries of Ovid memorialized by him
in the Ex Ponto: nequa laboranti incumbant oblivia famae (‘so that
oblivion should not oppress their struggling fame’, 536). In the same
way, the Epitaphium attempts to commemorate a Tuscus and his writings
as if in defiant response to that poignant question: tua sic sine nomine
virtus / ibit, et obscuris numero sociabitur umbris? (‘is this how your virtue
will pass away without a name and be united to the company of the
unknown shades?’, 21–2).
Karen Edwards has convincingly argued that the Milton/Diodati friend-
ship may have been ‘resurrected’ many years later in the Raphael as
phoenix simile in Paradise Lost 5.270–87 and in the ensuing conversation
between Raphael and Adam.80 The Epitaphium may work in a not
dissimilar way. As ‘the last of the epistles to Diodati’81 this poetic epistola
familiaris responds to and ultimately enshrines the ‘exuberant

77 78
See Martellotti 1968: 74. Hollis 2007: 428.
79
Cf. Ep. Pont. 4.16.3–4. See in general Hardie 2012a.
80
Cf. Ep. Dam. 187–9 and Edwards 2004: 129.
81
Woodhouse 1952: 265. On the Milton/Diodati correspondence and their associated ‘textual
exchange’, see Brown 2013.
178 estelle haan
pastoralism’82 of Diodati’s two extant Greek letters to Milton.83 There he
repeatedly invites his addressee to partake in a locus amoenus. That Dio-
datean invitation returns to haunt Thyrsis in a rather macabre way. For
now it is a neo-Latin pastoral voice from beyond the grave, echoed by
Tityrus, Alphesiboeus, Aegon, Amyntas, who individually call (vocat, 69)
him to hazel trees, ashes, willows, and streams respectively (69–70), while
collectively they offer a quasi-Virgilian response (71–2, compare Virgil, Ecl.
10.42–3) to Diodati’s quasi-Theocritean Greek.84 And, as if to confirm the
living Diodati’s express fears, ista canunt surdo (‘they are singing those
songs to the deaf’, 73).85 Both letters contain invitations to laughter.86 But
in the Epitaphium, risus (‘laughter’, 55) is but a memory, and it belongs not
to Milton but to Diodati himself (55–6). Moreover the Diodatean rebuke
that Milton should rejoice in his youthfulness is now voiced by pastoral
nymphs (83–6). Thyrsis highlights Damon’s ‘Cecropian wit’ (Cecropiosque
sales, 56) and ‘elegant charms’ (cultosque lepores, 56). The juxtaposition may
evoke Martial, Epig. 3.20.9: lepore tinctos Attico sales (‘wit tinged with Attic
charm’) and 4.23.6: Cecropio . . . lepore (‘Cecropian charm’), both of which
occur in the context of a discussion of the Greek epigram. The Miltonic
phrase may thus acknowledge not just Diodati’s Attic, but also his epi-
grammatic wit, demonstrated perhaps in the letters’ concluding epigram-
matic turn, and their recourse to proverbial utterances and wordplay. The
final word of the Epitaphium (thyrso) plays upon Thyrsis, the first word of
the poem’s Argumentum. In a quasi-epigrammatic turn a transformed
Thyrsis, punningly equated with the thúrsus, the wand of the revelling
Bacchantes,87 takes his place alongside Damon amid the festa . . . Orgia
(‘festive orgies’, 219) of Heaven itself.
On earth another transformation has already been effected. Although these
remarks have focused on Milton’s synthesis of the Italian neo-Latin pastoral
tradition, it is worth noting that he responds also to English neo-Latinity.
As plans for an epic are enunciated, the pastoral landscape is infiltrated by an
Anglicized antiquarianism, and by topographical itemization reminiscent of
William Camden’s Britannia (1586; translation by Philemon Holland 1610;

82
Campbell 1984: 165.
83
See French 1966: 98–9; 104–5. The manuscripts are preserved in the British Library at BM Add.
MS. 5016*, ff. 5 and 71.
84
The proper names are all found in Virgil. Aegon and Amyntas also appear in Theocritus.
85
Contrast Virg. Ecl. 10.8: non canimus surdis (‘it is not to the deaf that we sing’).
86 87
French 1966: 99 and 105. On the possible pun in Virgil, see Coleman 1977: 207 (on Ecl. 7.2).
 Pastoral 179
1637). Hence Rutupina per aequora (‘over the Rutupian seas’, 162);88 Armoricos
Britonum sub lege colonos (‘Armorican settlers under British law’, 165),89 Usa,
(‘Ouse’, 175);90 potor Alauni (‘he who drinks from the Alne’, 175)91 and
Tamara (‘Tamar’, 178).92 But Thyrsis professes a contented acknowledge-
ment of the geographical limitations of his readership. Diodati’s only pub-
lished poem (in Latin) appeared in an Oxford collection of epicedia on
Camden’s death, the Camdeni Insignia (1624). Here he extols the deceased
for illuminating his native land, promising him eternal fame dumque erit
Anglia / ab omnibus divisa terris (‘for as long as England is separated from all
lands’, 18–19),93 itself a reworking of the Virgilian et penitus toto divisos ab orbe
Britannos (‘and the Britons utterly divided from the whole world’, Ecl. 1. 66).
Indeed a recurring leitmotif of that volume is praise of Camden’s contentment
with a seemingly insular and essentially British subject. Milton’s topograph-
ical antiquarianism, his projected Arthuriad, his acknowledgement of geo-
graphical insularity are all aligned with his own poetic Britannia – a British
theme (Brittonicum, 171) to be sounded on a transformed fistula. As his
Sylvarum liber reaches its end Milton, like Petrarch’s Silvius and Silvanus,
aspires to undertake an epic itinerary. In so doing he must move beyond the
neo-Latin pastoral silva ‘to fresh Woods and Pastures new’ (Lycidas, 193).94

FURTHER READING
For a broad introduction to neo Latin pastoral, see the six articles by Grant 1955,
1956, 1957a, 1957b, 1961a, 1961b and his book length descriptive survey of the
genre 1965; see also McFarlane 1967; Marsh 2014a; Haan 2015 and (on neo Latin
theory of the pastoral) Nichols 1969. (On pastoral theory in general, see Empson
1935; Congleton 1952; Cooper 1977). Ford and Taylor 2006 contains a very useful
collection of essays on neo Latin pastoral. See also Paschalis 2007 for some
excellent chapters on the reception of Theocritus and Virgil in neo Latin
(Sannazaro; Milton) and vernacular poetry. More generally, on classical pastoral
and its European reception see, among others, Poggioli 1975; Lambert 1976;
Halperin 1983; Patterson 1987; Chaudhuri 1989; Alpers 1996; Hubbard 1998;
Skoie and Velázquez 2006 and Wilson Okamura 2010.

88
Rutupiae was identified by Camden with Richborough in Kent. Cf. Camden 1610: 340–1.
89
Camden 1610: 111 (in a section headed ‘Britons of Armorica’), quotes at length from William of
Malmesbury’s testimony that Constantine founded a colony of veteran British solders on the west
coast of Gaul.
90
Cf. Camden 1610: 367: ‘Isis, commonly called Ouse’.
91
Camden 1610: 259, 813, notes that Alaunus is the Latin name of both the Alne in Northumberland
and the Avon in Hampshire.
92
Camden 1610: 196, discusses the Tamar (a river that flows between Cornwall and Devon).
93
Townley 1624: E4r.
94
For the motif of the transcendence of pastoral in the neo-Latin eclogue, see Chaudhuri 2006.
 chapter 11

Didactic Poetry
Victoria Moul

Renaissance poets, readers and critics took the didactic quality of all litera-
ture seriously, in a way that even the most enthusiastic modern reader is
likely to find alien. Almost every discussion of the purpose of literature from
this period incorporates a version of the Horatian tag encouraging the
would-be poet to blend ‘what is useful and what is sweet, both delighting
and instructing the reader’ (Ars poetica, 343–4; see also 333–4). This ubiqui-
tous trope of combined ‘profit and pleasure’ is intensified by the educational
associations of Latin verse: Latin poetry was central to Renaissance education
and readers and writers of neo-Latin took the particular educational import-
ance and potential of Latin poetry for granted.1 So strong is the association
between education and the inculcation of Latin style that Abraham Cowley
(1618–67), worrying about the lack of (what we would call) scientific content
in the schools of his day, imagined a curriculum based on Latin texts which
combined scientific authority with stylistic excellence.2
Cowley’s own magnum opus, Plantarum libri sex (‘The Six Books of
Plants’) is precisely a combination of Latin poetic forms and scientific
seriousness. An extraordinarily varied work, its range of ‘instruction’ com-
prises almost the full range of possible Latin verse forms (epigram, elegy,
odes and two books of increasingly epic hexameter), political and historical
interpretation (including a prophecy of the decline of Europe and rise of
America), considerable botanical detail and several scientific debates, includ-
ing on the legitimacy of abortion and the mystery of female menstruation.3
Cowley’s poem is a serious attempt to convey the interest and importance of
natural history and medicine; it is also a serious attempt to set out a
classically derived poetics of those subjects. This remarkable and rewarding

1
On the role of Latin poetry in Renaissance education, see Chapter 3 in this volume, and Mack 2014.
2
Cowley 1661: 45–6.
3
On Cowley’s Latin see Bradner 1940: 118–22; Hinman 1960: 227–96; Ludwig 1989a; Hofmann 1994;
Monreal 2005 and 2010; Moul 2011, 2012 and 2013.

180
 Didactic Poetry 181
work is ‘didactic’ in the fullest possible early modern sense: that is, in a much
wider-ranging, more socially, politically and poetically central way than is
usually meant by the sometimes deadening phrase ‘Latin didactic poetry’.
Classicists use the term ‘Latin didactic’ to describe, principally, Lucretius’
De rerum natura (‘On the Nature of Things’) on Epicurean philosophy,
the Georgics of Virgil (ostensibly on farming, including the care and cultiva-
tion of crops, trees, livestock and bees), the Astronomica (‘Astronomical
Matters’) of Manilius and, as an ironic take upon the form, Ovid’s Ars
amatoria (‘The Art of Love’), Remedia amoris (‘Cures for Love’) and Med-
icamina faciei femineae (‘The Facial Cosmetics of Women’). Horace’s Ars
poetica (‘The Art of Poetry’) is sometimes included.4 The use of ‘didactic
poetry’ as a specific generic term is however contentious: there is very little
acknowledgement in either ancient or early modern criticism of didactic as a
genre of its own, rather than a form of epic, and a marked division in current
classical scholarship between those who endorse and those who reject the
broader term ‘didactic epic’.5 Moreover, a considerable number of major
texts usually excluded from consideration as ‘didactic’ have often been read
and taught as storehouses of information or as moral or political guidance –
examples range from Callimachus’ Aetia to Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Fasti,
and even Virgil’s Aeneid, which became, like several of the poems discussed
in this chapter, a school text within a few years of its publication.6
Many of these works – including the poems of Lucretius, Manilius,
Grattius and Nemesianus – were rediscovered by prominent early human-
ist scholars and poets, and the range of potential didactic models was
further extended, for Renaissance readers, by the inclusion in the canon of
shorter or fragmentary didactic poems ascribed to Virgil (Aetna, on
volcanoes) and Ovid (Halieutica, on fishing).7 Enthused by the emergence

4
Texts less often discussed include the two fragmentary Cynegetica (‘On Hunting’) by Grattius and
Nemesianus and the tenth book of Columella’s De re rustica (‘On Country Matters’).
5
Batstone 1997: 129: ‘ancient critics seem to treat didactic not as a genre, but as a particular mode of
epos’. Discussions of ancient evidence can be found in Effe 1977: 19–22; Gale 1994: 100–6; Volk 2002:
26–43. For the use (and usefulness) of the term ‘didactic epic’ see also Gale 1994: 99–128; Gale 2004,
Gale 2005 and Toohey 1996. For the Georgics and epic, see Farrell 1991: 207–72. Among early
modern critics, neither Scaliger 1591 nor Pontanus 1594, for instance, include ‘didactic’ as a generic
category; in both cases the poems now described as didactic are divided among various sub-categories
of epic. We do find Latin terms for ‘didactic’ verse in the eighteenth century, most noticeably in
François Oudin’s collection Poemata didascalica (Oudin 1749).
6
Harder 2007 and 2012 reads Callimachus’ Aetia within the frame of didactic poetry. For didactic
elements in the Metamorphoses see Hardie 1988 and 1995 and Wheeler 1995; for the Fasti Miller 1992
and Gee 1998; for the Aeneid Hardie 1986.
7
Lucretius and Manilius were rediscovered by Poggio in 1417; Grattius and Nemesianus by Sannazaro
at the very beginning of the sixteenth century.
182 victoria moul
of a substantial classical canon of instructional poetry, Renaissance poets,
first in Italy and then throughout Europe, began experimenting with
subjects as diverse – in the first century of humanism alone – as education
(perhaps the earliest neo-Latin didactic work, Gregorio Correr’s brief De
educandis et erudiendis liberis, from around 1430), astronomy (Basinio
Basini, Astronomicon libri ii (1455)) and silk worms (Lodovico Lazzarrelli,
Opusculum de Bombyce, around 1495). Several poets produced multiple
didactic poems – including Fracastoro’s Syphilis (on the venereal disease
named after the poem) and Alcon (on the care of hounds), or Pontano’s
three works Urania, Meteorum liber i and De hortis Hesperidum libri ii –
and the tradition enjoyed a late, and now well-documented resurgence in
popularity among Jesuit poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries.8
The relatively small body of work on neo-Latin didactic has tended
to focus on either the earliest period of Italian humanism, or on the
flowering of neo-Latin didactic in the later seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries.9 One or two scholars have stressed the importance of a broad
understanding of the didactic category – IJsewijn for instance is unusual
in discussing versified history in his chapter, and for noting the signifi-
cance of neo-Latin didactic poems which themselves became ‘classics’ of
the classroom over many generations.10 This broader view has not been
much followed up by subsequent scholarship, but it is important in
particular for approaching texts from the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, and from outside the Jesuit tradition. Accordingly, this chap-
ter discusses an intentionally wide range of texts, and draws several
examples from a region (England and Scotland) that has been particu-
larly neglected in accounts of neo-Latin verse. The chapter is not
intended as a comprehensive overview of neo-Latin didactic poetry.
Texts have been selected with the hope of broadening our feel for the
didactic possibilities of Latin poetry of this period, and in my discus-
sion, I suggest some avenues for future exploration both of the varied
ways in which neo-Latin poets responded to the classical texts we
usually describe as didactic and of the centrality of the didactic ideal
to serious neo-Latin poetry as a whole.

8
Haskell 2003 above all, which identifies around 250 Latin didactic poems by Jesuits; but see also
Haskell 1998a, 2008, 2010, 2014a and Haskell and Hardie 1999.
9
On early Italian examples, see Roellenbleck 1975. Ludwig 1989a offers an influential schema for eight
types of neo-Latin didactic, though the bulk of the article is devoted to those most imitative of the
Georgics (his second category). For later, and especially Jesuit examples, see footnote 8.
10
IJsewijn and Sacré 1998: 39–40.
 Didactic Poetry 183
Varieties of Didactic
There is a particular kind of aesthetic pleasure to works that combine
abstruse, strange or compelling factual detail with a familiar literary or
emotional framework or narrative: popular nature documentaries or
works of natural history, for instance, tend to work in just this way –
we expect to find new and surprising scientific detail, and (in film)
extraordinary images, but the structure and narrative shape of these
works is usually highly conventional – following the passages of the
seasons or a single life-cycle – and often dependent upon powerful
personification. Very few modern readers have the kind of intimate
familiarity with the Latin poetry of Virgil or Lucretius that would allow
them to appreciate the interplay in much neo-Latin poetry between the
aesthetically and emotionally familiar (such as themes, set-pieces, similes
and even individual phrases borrowed from classical authors) and the
strikingly strange, technical or simply modern (whether the manufacture
of gunpowder, the care of silkworms or contemporary history and
politics). On the contrary, for most modern readers, even classicists,
poetry which functions in this way offers a rebarbative combination of
the difficult and the obscure. But the patterns of Renaissance education,
with intense and detailed study of a fairly small canon of Latin literature
over many years, created precisely the conditions for this kind of
aesthetic effect.11
Echoes of Virgil’s Georgics are the most frequently employed short-
hand for didactic content and intent in a given neo-Latin poem. The four
lines of indirect questions with which the first book of the Georgics
begins – each of which correspond to a topic in the poem – is a
particularly recognizable and widely imitated passage, used to establish
just this kind of counterpoint between highly familiar source text and
novel content. In Oudin’s 1749 anthology of (mostly Jesuit) Latin
didactic, poems on gunpowder, coffee, gold-mining, earthquakes,
letter-writing, flowers, silk-worms, birds, fish-ponds and comets all begin
with versions of this motif.12 The opening of Claude Quillet’s Callipaedia
(‘On Beautiful Children’, 1655), a poem on the appropriate choice of

11
A surviving schoolboy’s notebook indicates that one mid-sixteenth-century English school spent a
full year on the Georgics (Baldwin 1944: i, 327–32).
12
François Tarillon, sj, Pulvis pyrius carmen; Gulielmo Massieu, Caffaeum carmen; François Antoine
Le Febvre, sj, Aurum carmen and Terrae-motus carmen; Hervaeo de Montaigu, sj, Ratio
conscribendae epistolae; Patricio Trante, dm, De conubiis florum; Vida, Bombycum; Joanne Roze, sj,
Carmen aviarium; François Champion, sj, Stagna; Etienne Auguste Souciet, sj, Cometae carmen. On
Oudin in general, see Haskell 2003: 119–21.
184 victoria moul
wife, time of conception and moral attitude in order to procure beautiful
and successful children, is a good example of the possibilities.13 Compare
Virgil’s opening:
Quid faciat laetas segetes, quo sidere terram
vertere, Maecenas, ulmisque adiungere vitis
conveniat, quae cura boum, qui cultus habendo
sit pecori, apibus quanta experientia parcis,
hinc canere incipiam.
What makes the corn crops glad, under which star
To turn the soil, Maecenas, and wed your vines
To elms, the care of cattle, keeping of flocks,
All the experience thrifty bees require
Such are the themes of my song.14
With the Callipaedia:
Quid faciat laetos thalamos; quo semine felix
Exsurgat proles, & amoeni gratia vultûs;
Sidera quae lepidas fundant per membra figuras;
Et quae vis animae Geniali praesit Amori:
Quae decora eximiam pulchro sub corpore mentem
Commendent, clarísque; Hominem virtutibus ornent,
Hîc canere aggredior.
What makes for happy marriage beds; by what seed
Arise healthy offspring and the blessing of a pleasant appearance;
What stars pour a charming shape over [a child’s] limbs;
And what force of spirit presides over married Love:
What kinds of outward beauty bespeak
An outstanding mind within the beautiful body,
And adorn a man of renowned virtue,
Here I set out to sing of these matters.15
Quillet’s work belongs to a seam of neo-Latin poems concerned with
medical matters: authors exploring the new sciences of medicine, and
particularly human fertility, found it hard to resist either the poetic
resonance of the available classical models, or the memorable effects of
reapplying Virgil’s evocatively anthropomorphic descriptions of
passionate livestock to human reproduction.16 This witty reworking

13
There is a fine discussion of this intriguing poem by Philip Ford (Ford 1999). See also Vissac 1862:
78–80.
14 15
Translation Wilkinson 1982. Quillet 1655: 1.1–7.
16
On medical didactic verse in general, see Haskell 2014b.
 Didactic Poetry 185
of the opening of the Georgics replaces Virgil’s segetes (‘crops’) with
thalamos (‘bed-chambers’, and by association the sexual side of
marriage).17 Other echoes include the opening of Manilius’
Astronomica, because the timing of conception in relation to the
astrological signs is considered crucial by Quillet, as by many early
modern authorities.
Lucretius offered a model for both more technical and more contro-
versial material (in religious and philosophical terms) than is found in
Virgil.18 Quillet himself combines Lucretian and Virgilian elements, but
David Kinloch (1559–1617), a Scottish-French predecessor of Quillet,
who has attracted almost no attention at all, puts Lucretius, Virgil and
even Horace to even more explicit use in his De hominis procreatione,
anatome, ac morbis internis (‘On Human Procreation, Anatomy and
Internal Diseases’) of 1596. Kinloch too begins with a series of indirect
questions sketching the terms of his work; but the relationship with
Virgil is more remote. The bold confrontation of both sex and death is
blunter than anything we find in the Georgics, and instead depends
heavily upon Lucretius:

Vnde homini primum genitalia semina vitae;

Quantum vivida vis, quam spiritus insitus illis
Mira gerat, pingit puerum dum matris in alvo,
Depictumque effert dias in luminis oras:
[. . .]
Hinc canere incipiam; quando spe laudis Apollo
Acri percussit juvenilia pectora thyrso.
[. . .]
Qui caeli terraeque potens moliris habenas,
Alme parens, dubiis animum mihi suggere rebus.19
From where first [arose] the reproductive seeds of human life; how greatly the life
force, how the spirit sowed in them brings forth wonders, forms a child while in
his mother’s womb, and once formed ushers him out to the holy shores of light:
[. . .] On these matters I shall begin to sing; since, in hope of praise, Apollo struck

17
Thalamus, a word of Greek origin, often has an erotic connotation in Latin.
18
Useful discussions of the reception of Lucretius in neo-Latin didactic can be found in Goddard 1991;
Haskell 1997, 1998a and 2008; Pantin 1999; Gee 2008. On the Renaissance reception of Lucretius
more generally, see for example Longo 2004; Reeve 2007; Prosperi 2007 and Hardie 2009.
19
Johnston 1637: 3. Kinloch’s work was reprinted in volume ii of Johnston’s Delitiae Poetarum
Scotorum. Quotations and page references are to the DPS rather than the 1596 edition, as images
of the DPS are easily found online. I have found no commentary upon this poem, aside from a
single page in Bradner 1940: 126–7. The phrase dias in luminis oras recurs twice in the dramatic
description of the violence and danger of childbirth (Johnston 1637: 28 and 29).
186 victoria moul

my youthful breast with his harsh thyrsus [. . .] You who, in your power, wield
the reins of the heaven and the earth, Nurturing parent, supply my mind with
these themes of doubtful issue.

Multiple phrases here are derived from the opening and closing sections of
the first book of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, including the phrase vivida
vis (vivida vis animi, DRN 1.73, describing the intellectual heroism of
Epicurus); dias in luminis oras (DRN 1.22, the opening prayer to Venus),
Alme parens (Alma Venus, DRN 1.2) and spe laudis Apollo / Acri percussit
juvenilia pectora thyrso (compare DRN 1.922–5, sed acri / percussit thyrso
laudis spes magna meum cor / et simul incussit suavem mi in pectus amorem /
Musarum (‘But high hope of fame has struck my heart with its sharp goad
and in so doing has implanted in my breast the sweet love of the Muses’).
The phrase Qui caeli terraeque potens moliris habenas (‘You who, in your
power, wield the reins of the heaven and the earth’) resembles both
Lucretius’ opening prayer to Venus (quae mare . . . quae terras / concelebras,
‘you who fill [with life] the sea and the earth’, DRN 1.3–4) and the
conclusion of that prayer (DRN 1.21, quae . . . rerum naturam sola gubernas,
‘you who alone govern the nature of things’). In fact Kinloch’s poem
abounds with terms and phrases culled from Lucretius, such as semina,
corpora, ab origine prima, imprimis, primordia vitae, species. Unlike Virgil –
but in direct imitation of Lucretius – Kinloch repeats key words and
phrases insistently as the force of their technical meaning and significance
to the argument emerges over time.
Kinloch’s mode of imitation often feels like a forceful claiming of rival
models by Lucretian diction and a Lucretian perspective.20 In a memorable
passage on the reproductive drive, Kinloch sets Lucretius and, interest-
ingly, Horace against one another:
Sed quia praecipiti pereunt mortalia fato;
Idcirco sobolis generandae innata libido
Casuras rerum species à morte redemit.21
But because all that is mortal perishes, subject to a swift death;
For that reason the inborn drive to produce offspring
Has redeemed from death the beauty [or appearance] of things,
even as they are about to die.

20
Horace’s Ars poetica has not often been discussed by classicists as an example of Latin didactic,
although it is hard to think of a more plainly didactic poem; recent exceptions include Reinhardt
2013 and Hardie 2014.
21
Johnston 1637: 6.
 Didactic Poetry 187
Alongside the Lucretian vocabulary (rerum species), several elements here
recall a very famous passage from the Ars poetica, on the shortness of
human life and the associated constant flux even of language:
Debemur morti nos nostraque [. . .]
Mortalia facta peribunt:
Nedum sermonum stet honos, & gratia vivax.
Multa renascentur, quae iam cecidere, cadentque,
Quae nunc sunt in honore, vocabula, si volet usus
(Ars poetica, 63; 67 70).
We owe to death ourselves and all that’s ours [. . .] Mortal deeds shall perish; and
the glory and living grace of speech shall no longer endure. Many words which
have now fallen away will be reborn, and many which are now held in high esteem
shall fall away, if common usage desires it.22
Kinloch’s pereunt mortalia (‘mortal things perish’) echoes Horace’s morta-
lia facta peribunt (‘mortal deeds shall perish’), and Kinloch’s idea that the
innata libido (‘inborn lust’) can redeem, or buy back from death (a morte
redemit) the casuras rerum species (‘appearance or beauty of things even as
they fade’) responds to the metaphor of Horace’s debemur morti nos
nostraque (‘we owe to death ourselves and all that’s ours’) as well as the
pervasive Horatian idea that human pleasure and beauty is fleeting.
This is vivid and memorable Latin verse, animated by a real sense of
scientific optimism and excitement. Like Lucretius – and in Lucretian
terms – Kinloch sets out a reasoned resistance to the vagaries of human
experience; though like Lucretius, too, his strong claim that reason is a
greater comfort to suffering than art is (perhaps ironically) delivered
in markedly ambitious verse.23 Horace’s Ars poetica is, oddly, usually
excluded from modern discussions of classical Latin didactic verse; but
its didactic force (and contemporary familiarity) is well attested by
Kinloch’s allusion here.
British Latin literature of this period also includes examples of
that subset of neo-Latin poetry devoted specifically to astronomy and
astrology, and modelled primarily upon Aratus and Manilius.24 George
Buchanan’s Sphaera (1586) has attracted critical attention in recent years,
and it is itself particularly indebted to the Urania of Giovanni Pontano

22
Kinloch is not unusual in being struck by this beautiful passage of Horace. For a discussion of Ben
Jonson’s version of these lines, see Moul 2010: 188–92.
23
Kinloch’s literary ambition is plain in the opening of the poem, which claims that medicine – and
by implication, medically informed poetry – can be more efficacious than the song of Orpheus
himself.
24
Ludwig 1988: 105.
188 victoria moul
(1429–1503).25 We see the influence of this kind of poetry reflected in a
range of popular works: Marcello Palingenio’s Zodiacus Vitae (‘The Zodiac
of Life’, 1536) appeared in a remarkable ten English printed editions in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, suggesting that it may have been used
frequently as a school text.26 Somewhere on the boundaries of didacticism
lies a sequence of poems, the De sphaerarum ordine tractatiunculam
(‘A Short Treatise on the Arrangement of the Planets’) by the Welsh poet
William Vaughan (1577–1641), the phrasing of which recalls Buchanan’s
much more substantial work.27 Finally, Robert Moor’s (1568–1640) Dia-
rium historicopoeticum (‘Historico-Poetic Diary’) of 1595 is an example of
astrological lore linked to historical and political events, with marked
allusions from the opening lines (which are addressed to Janus) to Ovid’s
Fasti as well as to Manilius.28 This very substantial work, with a book
devoted to each month of the year, links the constellations of each calendar
month with a series of key historical events, from those of ancient and
biblical history to the recent and even contemporary, such as the battle of
Bosworth Field (1485) and the deaths of Sir Thomas More (1535) and
Sir Francis Walsingham (1590).
Even in the British sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – usually far from
prominent in any account of neo-Latin didactic verse29 – we find many
works with explicit instructional content, making varied use of a wide range
of diction, style, tone and emphasis suggested by the classical (and earlier
neo-Latin) didactic models. In the second half of this chapter, I would like
to extend this discussion to consider both the general association between
Latin poetry and education; and, more specifically, the ways in which the
25
On Buchanan’s Sphaera, see Gee 2009; Haskell 1998a; Pantin 1995; Naiden 1952. On Pontano’s
Urania, see Goddard 1991; Gee 2008; Haskell 1998a.
26
See Chomarat 1996; Haskell 1998b (in Atherton); Binns 2002: 187–8; Binns 1990: 114–16. IJsewijn
1990: 61 calls it ‘one of the most widely read books of the sixteenth century’. Over sixty editions
appeared between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, mostly in Protestant countries, as the
poem was proscribed by the Catholic Church. Binns also remarks on the evidence of Shakespeare’s
reading of both Mantuan and Palingenius, presumably at school.
27
Vaughan 1598. Like Quillet, Vaughan is interested in the links between astrology and human
reproduction.
28
Moor 1595. Regular marginal annotations direct the reader most frequently to Ovid’s Fasti and
Metamorphoses, Manilius’ Astronomica and Hyginus’ De Astronomia; less often to the full range of
Roman historians, plus Aratus, Cicero, Virgil and Horace. I have not found any scholarly discussion
of this work, though I am grateful to Hugh Adlington for informing me that John Donne owned
a copy.
29
Although I note that in a very recent chapter Estelle Haan comments that ‘Neo-Latin didactic
poetry seems to function as a literary and linear generic continuum through the three centures of
British neo-Latin under discussion [c. 1500–1800]’ (Haan 2015: 437). Haan’s chapter includes brief
remarks on works by George Buchanan, John Milton, Thomas Bisse, Joseph Addison and
Thomas Gray.
 Didactic Poetry 189
didactic force of classical Latin poetry (in this instance, and perhaps espe-
cially, of Virgil’s Georgics) might be evoked to highlight the educative
seriousness of many types of neo-Latin poems, often far removed, in their
overall effect, from any of the classical didactic models.

Didactic Poetry and Poetic Education

The De arte poetica of Marco Girolamo Vida (1517; 1527), ranked by
Scaliger alongside Horace’s Ars poetica, is one of the most influential
examples of neo-Latin didactic; it is moreover a striking instance of
didactic verse in which education is itself thematized. The whole work –
but especially the moving first book – is concerned not only with how to
write poetry (by which he means epic poetry, in the broad sense discussed
above) but how to inculcate the love of poetry and how to teach the
writing of it. All three books of the De arte poetica are profoundly Virgilian:
Virgil is held up as the first and best model for all Latin poetry, the great
majority of the cited examples are from Virgil, and as Philip Hardie has
shown, many of the most memorable moments and images are careful
combinations of Virgilian passages.30
The first book depends on the Georgics in particular, returning again and
again to comparisons between the young student of poetry and the plants or
livestock for which the farmer cares. The result is often humorous and
affectionate. Here Vida notes that a passion for literature, once instilled, is
an enduring distraction for a young man who tries to settle down to business
or a profession. If ever he is reminded of his old love for literature (libido
nota – the ‘familiar lust’), chaos and youthful rebellion quickly ensue:
Exsultant animis cupidi, pugnantque parentum
Imperiis: nequit ardentes vis ulla morari.
Sic assuetus equus iam duris ora lupatis,
Forte procul notis si armenta aspexit in arvis,
Huc veterum ferri cupit haud oblitus amorum,
Atque hic atque illic haeret, frenisque repugnat:
Quove magis stimulis instas, hoc acrius ille
Perfurit. it tandem multo vix verbere victus
Coeptum iter. ipsa tamen respectans crebra moratur
Pascua, & hinnitu late loca complet acuto.

30
On Vida’s De arte poetica see Williams 1976 (which prints the text of both the 1517 and 1527
editions) and Hardie 1992. Porter 2014 discusses Vida, Scaliger and Pontanus (although very briefly).
On Vida’s influence upon Scaliger, see Rolfes 2001. Yasmin Haskell also discusses this poem in
Chapter 1 of this volume.
190 victoria moul
In their eagerness their spirits swell up, and they rebel against their parents’
commands; ardent as they are, no force can stay them. In the same way, if a
steed, though already broken to the painful bit in his mouth, chances to catch a
distant glimpse of his herd in the fields of home, he yearns to be led there,
remembering keenly [former] loves, and he balks, first here, then there, and fights
against the reins. The more you press on the spurs, the more violently he rages.
Finally only just curbed by repeated blow of the quirt, he resumes the course he
began, though still he pauses to look back on those crowded pastures, and fills the
fields far and wide with his shrill whinny. (1.296 305)31
The schooling of boys is often described in violent or near-violent terms of
discipline and constraint; but here the young man remembers the literary
pleasures of his schooldays as idyllic and experiences his professional career,
instead, as brutalizing discipline. Vida toys with our expectation that love is
the chief source of distraction for a young man. The erotics of the simile are
discreet – the young horse catches a glimpse of his old armenta in arvis (‘herds
in the fields’, compare the young foal, pullus in arvis, at G. 3.75), which could
imply simply his childhood family and friends – but the suggestion of sexual
interest is enhanced by a conversation with two passages of Georgics 3.
Vida’s horse is already ‘accustomed to the painful bit in his mouth’, but
the phrase assuetus . . . duris ora lupatis echoes Virgil, Georgics 3.207–8:
prensique negabunt / verbera lenta pati et duris parere lupatis (‘once caught,
they refuse to tolerate the tough lash or to obey the rough bit’): that is,
Vida describes the successfully broken horse with a phrase designed to
remind us of Virgil’s description of resistance to that process. At that point
in Georgics 3 Virgil sets out what might endanger the effective training of
the promising young horse – either too much rich food before they are
fully broken, or, the greatest threat of all, (209ff.) sexual desire. For Vida’s
young lawyer or businessman, the reading and writing of poetry, the lure
of the Muses, stands in for both those temptations.
Finally, the last line of Vida’s simile, in which the reluctant young horse
is forced to tear himself away from the sight of his old pastures, and
whinnies shrilly in pain as he does so (et hinnitu late loca complet acuto),
is lifted in part from Virgil’s memorable comparison of a handsome horse
to Saturn at the moment when, caught in adultery with Philyra by his wife,
he transforms himself into a stallion and gallops away: et altum / Pelion
hinnitu fugiens implevit acuto (G. 3.93–4).32 This suggests again that the

31
Text and translation from Williams 1976. Text cited is that of 1527.
32
Claude Quillet was also inspired by this vignette. The longest mythological digression in his poem
concerns Philyra, her rape by Saturn and the subsequent birth of the centaur Chiron (on this
episode see Ford 1999: 134–7).
 Didactic Poetry 191
young man’s passion for literature is of an erotic intensity. For most
readers, the long description of the dominating power of sexual love over
all creatures is the most memorable element of Georgics 3; Vida’s poem
utilizes our memory of those passages to stress that in this case it is not lust
that threatens the young man, but love of poetry itself – not behaving like
Virgil’s horse, but instead the thought of Virgil’s actual lines.
Andrew Wallace’s recent work has demonstrated the extent to which
Virgil’s Georgics was read, in the Renaissance, not only as a canonical
school text, or an example of didactic poetry in a practical sense, but as a
work itself about the power of poetry and poetry’s didactic force.33 Wallace
does not discuss Vida’s De arte poetica, but the intense Virgilianism of
Vida’s poem, and in particular its reliance on the Georgics, only strengthens
his case. Appropriately enough, the De arte poetica had itself become a
popular school text, alongside the Georgics, within years of Vida’s death.34
The educational afterlife of Vida’s De arte poetica is not unusual among
neo-Latin poetry.35 Poliziano’s Silvae – explicitly composed within and for
an educational context, as introductions to lectures on Latin literature –
were widely studied in European schools in the sixteenth century.36
Palingenio’s Zodiacus vitae (‘The Zodiac of Life’, 1536) was particularly
popular in Protestant countries (including England). English schoolboys
were also reading Mancini’s Quatuor de virtutibus (‘Poem of the Four
Virtues’, first printed 1484), an explicitly didactic work in intentionally
accessible Latin elegiacs, intended to supply morally improving material
for students at a fairly early stage in their study of Latin.37 Contemporary
neo-Latin works continued to be added to the school curriculum through-
out the early modern period: the 1582 edition of Christopher Ocland’s
ambitious Praelia Anglorum (‘The Battles of the English’) prints an order
signed by members of the Privy Council and Ecclesiastical High Commis-
sion instructing that the poem is to be read in schools throughout the land;
in 1652 the Council of State suggested that Payne Fisher’s Latin hexameter
accounts of Cromwell’s successful campaigns should be read in schools.38
Some works were aimed at professionals rather than school or university
students: David Kinloch justifies the explicitness of his material on

33
Wallace 2010: e.g. at 124.
34
Dainville 1978: 173 notes that it was an established Jesuit classroom text by 1575.
35
On neo-Latin in Renaissance schools in general, see Mack 2014.
36
Coroleu 1999 discusses this phenomenon, and looks in detail at two of the many surviving
commentaries on Poliziano’s poems.
37
See Baldwin 1944: 297, 304, 310 and Binns 1990: 116.
38
For details see Norbrook 1999: 237. On Fisher, See Moul 2016.
192 victoria moul
conception, pregnancy and the multiple causes of infertility in De hominis
procreatione (‘On Human Procreation’, 1596) by explaining that the work
is aimed at doctors, who would be professionally embarrassed if they were
unable to explain and advise upon these matters. Nearly a hundred years
later, readers who consulted Bartholin’s prose treatise De medicis poetis (‘On
Doctor-Poets’, 1669) would find themselves directed to Kinloch among a
host of other poets apparently of use to the medical professional.39

Three Variations on Virgil’s War-Horse

Generations of critics have commented upon the pronounced (and
sometimes disturbing) personification of both plants and animals in the
Georgics: when we think of Virgil’s poem, the cast of memorable ‘characters’
is likely to include the love-sick and plague-ridden creatures of Book 3, the
bees of Book 4 and perhaps even the young vine who shudders at the
pruning knife (2.369) alongside the more conventionally political or mytho-
logical highlights. Neo-Latin poets adapt and respond to these memorable
passages of personificatory instruction according to the terms of their own
didacticism – we have already seen one example of this in Vida’s humorous
comparison of a young man distracted by his old love of literature to a
broken horse who still longs for his pastures. In the final section of this
chapter I look at three more poets who, writing in different contexts and
to quite different effects, deployed the hard-to-forget force of Virgil’s
personification for their own didactic purposes.
In 1579 appeared the De republica Anglorum instauranda libri decem
(‘Ten Books on the Foundation of the English State’) by Thomas
Chaloner, a work dating from the early 1560s, when Chaloner was ambas-
sador in Spain. This very substantial work is described by James Binns
both as a didactic poem and an ‘allegorical epic’.40 Although it has very
little of the narrative coherence we might expect from a traditional epic, its
didactic intention is plain – Books 4, 5 and 6 are devoted, respectively, to
the development of a strong agricultural policy; the importance of military
training for young men; and the breeding of horses and other preparations
for war. Other books praise the clergy (Book 1), discuss education (Book 2),
condemn money-lending (Book 3) and other sins (Book 8). Book 9 is
concerned with the education of women, and Book 10 with the law, before
addressing the monarch directly.
39
Bartholin 1669.
40
Chaloner was English ambassador to Spain from 1561 to 1564 and died in London in 1565. De
republica was published posthumously. See Binns 1990: 26–30 and (very briefly) IJsewijn and Sacré
1998: 40. To my knowledge there has been no longer study of Chaloner’s work.
 Didactic Poetry 193
Chaloner’s discussion of horsebreeding is much longer than the corres-
ponding passages from Virgil, but is recognizably derived from them. In
this sequence he combines many features from Georgics 3 – including the
separation of the mares and the threat of the gadfly – with some details in
the choice of meadow borrowed from Georgics 4 (on the perfect site for
a bee-hive):
Tu verò, hoc vitii propria sarcire medela
Si cupis, amotis maribus lectissima equarum
Agmina dumosis depascere saltibus herbam
Institues tacito gaudentia saepè recessu,
Fons ubi vicinus scatebrosis bulliat vndis,
Plurimáque optatas stirps quercea porrigat umbras,
Solis ab aestiui radiis, stimulóque proterui,
Qui nocet armentis longè infestissimus, oestri.
Hinc illis sub vere nouo manifesta libido,
Et dulcis furor inguinibus proludet hiulcis,
Vt saturae iacténtque iubas, largóque ruentis
Hinnitu cieant gratissima vota mariti:
Qui tandèm eductus stabulo, et securus amorum
Regnator vacuo in campo, genitalia matri
Admissus decimae generoso semine solus
Impleat: vlteriùs Venerem cohibeto salacis,
Ne vigor ob nimium genitalis langueat vsum.41
And as for you, if you wish to repair this lack
With the proper remedy, remove the males and set a choice
Band of mares to crop the grass in thorny meadows,
Rejoicing often in their silent separation,
Where a nearby stream bubbles in gushing streams,
And many an oak trunk offers longed for shade
From the rays of the sweltering sun, and the sting of the bold
Gadfly, by far the greatest nuisance to pester beasts in the field.
Then when, at the beginning of spring, the sexual drive first shows
itself in them,
And a sweet fury begins to play in the furrows of their private parts,
So that in satisfaction they toss their manes, and rouse with
their repeated
Whinnying their husband’s most welcome desire, as he rushes
upon them:
For he has now at last been brought out of the stable, and secure
in his love
Lord in the empty plain, is allowed entry to the mother’s genitals
To fill, all by himself, the tenth mother with his fertile seed.

41
Chaloner 1579: 127. No line numbers.
194 victoria moul
But keep the lustful beast from any further sexual pleasure,
Lest his reproductive strength should lessen from too much use.

One difficulty of writing about poetry of this sort is that, as an excerpt, this
passage of Chaloner reads like a good deal of neo-Latin Virgilian verse.
There is skill in redeploying familiar passages of the Georgics in this way,
and for the well-read reader there is a kind of pleasure in it, too: these
are comfortingly familiar horses, flirting enjoyably with the most risqué
(and probably most memorable) parts of Virgil’s poem. But as a whole
book of poetry, rather than just a few lines, what is compelling about
Chaloner’s voice lies largely in how unVirgilian a message he uses Virgil to
convey. Whereas Virgil allows, in his description, for horses bred either for
battle or for racing, Chaloner’s version focuses solely upon horses bred for
war, and he adds to Virgil’s description of ideal equine physiology (a broad
chest, flowing mane and so on) elements of commercial realism and
interest in the technicalities of government quite alien to the Georgics.
He proposes, for instance, that landowners in possession of good pasture
who never make use of it for breeding horses should be fined and
publically shamed for a failure to contribute to their country; whereas
the most successful breeders should be rewarded with public honours. This
polemical point is made memorable precisely because it is so unlike
anything we find in the Georgics; the general intense dependence upon
Virgil for the description of the landscape, livestock and husbandry acts as
a kind of foil to set off Chaloner’s hard-headed suggestions for the
successful management of resources.
In Rusticus, a verse treatise on Hesiod and Virgil’s Georgics dating from
1483, and one of his four Silvae, composed as prefatory poetry to his lectures
on classical literature, Poliziano also offers a version of Virgil’s ideal horse:
Cui pulchro micat acre caput luduntque decorae
fronte comae, vibrant aures, atque orbe nigranti
praegrandes exstant oculi; tum spiritus amplis
naribus it fervens, stat cervix ardua [. . .]
Crescunt spissa toris lateque animosa patescunt
pectora consurguntque humeri et iam sessile tergum est,
spinaque depressos gemino subit ordine lumbos
et castigatum cohibent crassa ilia ventrem;
fundunt se laetae clunes subcrispaque densis
cauda riget saetis et luxuriantia crebrae
velant colla iubae ac dextra cervice vagantur.
Tum tereti substricta genu mollissima flectit
crura ferox, celsum ingrediens fremituqe superbit;
 Didactic Poetry 195
grande sonat tornata cavo brevis ungula cornu,
ingenti referens Corybantia cymbala pulsu.
(Rusticus, 266 9; 272 82)
His fierce head flickers, his elegant mane plays upon his forehead, his ears quiver, and
his huge eyes stand out in their black sockets; then a fiery breath issues from his large
nostrils; he holds his neck high [. . .] His vigorous chest grows strong with thickset
muscles and opens out broadly; his shoulders develop; his back is ready for a rider; a
double ridge runs along his loins and his stout flanks support his firm stomach. His
sleek haunches broaden out, and his slightly wavy tail is stiff with dense bristles, and
his thick mane veils his sturdy neck and flutters over his right shoulder; then,
drawing in his rounded knee, he bends his supple legs high spiritedly, and rearing
up as he advances, he neighs proudly; the concave horn of his short, rounded hoof
creates a loud sound, recalling Corybantic cymbals as it beats the ground.42
Multiple elements here are either borrowed directly from Virgil or closely
related to Virgilian descriptions – compare for instance densa iuba (‘dense
mane’, G. 3.86) with Poliziano crebrae . . . iubae and densis . . . saetis);
duplex agitur per lumbos spina (‘a double ridge runs downs his back’,
G. 3.87) and Poliziano spinaque depressos gemino subit ordine lumbos; Virgil
mollia crura reponit (‘he lowers his legs gently’, G. 3.76) and Poliziano tereti
substricta genu mollissima flectit / crura ferox; Virgil et solido graviter sonat
ungula cornu (‘his hoof resounds loudly with its solid horn’, G. 3.88)
and Poliziano grande sonat tornata cavo brevis ungula cornu. All the key
descriptions – of head, neck, nostrils, back, body, buttock, hoof, mane
and gait – are common to both (and indeed also to Chaloner, who includes
a very similar description), although Poliziano tends to expand on
Virgil’s details.
But this version of Virgil’s horse is, like Chaloner’s, also significantly
selective, though to almost opposite effect. Poliziano’s resonant vignette
has removed from its Virgilian model all hint of war, and indeed the poem
continues: o dulces pastoris opes! (‘O the sweet riches of the shepherd!’, 283).
This is a pastoralized version of georgic accomplishment, and the horse’s
strength and beauty is an end in itself. This small-scale example is repre-
sentative of the work as a whole, which for all its fluency, force and close
recasting of Virgil, systematically suppresses all the explicitly political
elements of the Georgics as well as the darker elements of the poem: this
is a countryside without significant plague, storm or fire. What appears at
first sight a subtle and perhaps insignificant detail – that Poliziano’s horse,
for all its Virgilian detail, is not a war-horse – in fact reveals a sustained

42
Text and translation from Fantazzi 2004.
196 victoria moul
interpretive agenda to Poliziano’s project. The Georgics as read through
Poliziano are safer and sunnier than they seem without him.
Chaloner places a Virgilian vignette of equine beauty and sexual passion
within a book-long treatment of the martial and economic importance of
horse-breeding – an endeavour which is central to his vision of English
wealth and success – whereas Poliziano’s enduringly influential interpret-
ation of Virgil elides the suggestion of war entirely. A final work, however,
uses the same passage of the Georgics to steer a touching middle ground.
The Lusus poetici (‘Poetic Entertainments’, 1605) of the Scottish poet
David Hume is divided into three books. The inscription on the title page
of the volume is taken from the Georgics, but the books are described as
‘elegies’, ‘epigrams’ and ‘psalms and other poems’. The latter includes,
however, a long hexameter poem Aselcanus (pages 86–104 in the volume,
575 lines).43 The poem is dedicated to the theologian Andrew Melville,
whom the poet addresses as his father, linking Melville’s tenderness
towards Hume with both parental and divine love.
The expansive and circular style of Hume’s poem is difficult to sum-
marize, but its central movement expounds the pleasures and satisfactions
of a simple and virtuous life, emphasizes God’s love for his people (as a
father or grandfather for his children), and urges in particular the import-
ance of self-control in resisting both passionate urgency (even in religious
matters) and cowardice or laziness. At the centre of the poem is a long
simile illustrating this ideal of self-control:
Qualis ubi longum Martis meditatus amorem
Acer equus: iamque arma audet; iam proelia poscit,
Vulneráque, strepitúsque virûm, fremitúsque tubarum
Hausit ovans; iras acuit, gliscítque periclis
Invictum pectus bellis; et conscia virtus:
Continuo in medios ruat imperterritus hostes;
Sed fraeno facilis iussus, expectat; et acres
Interea glomerat gressus; longeque phalangas
Circumsultat, adhuc sessori et mitis habenis.
Verum ubi fraena iubis laxa, et calcaria longo
Accepit lateri, Dominóque volentia sensit:
Fertur in adversos: perque horrida tela, per enses

43
Hume 1605. Dana Sutton’s neo-Latin library offers a (repunctuated) text and translation, as well as
an introductory essay to the volume as a whole (http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/hume2/).
There are some brief remarks on Hume’s Latin poetry in Bradner 1940: 161–2 and 183–4. I have
not found any scholarly comment on Aselcanus in particular, although Hume’s prose works have
attracted some recent attention (for which see Sutton’s introduction).
 Didactic Poetry 197
Fulmineos; certámque vomentia fulgura mortem:
Inque oculos quacunque pavor se vibrat, et aures,
Degeneres animos, et corda ignava refellit.
Quod si nulla vocant arma; aut inflectere gyros
Vaenarive capras, lusu oblectatus inani
Contentus, Domino pacatum inglorius aeuum
Transigit, imbellesque animum demittit ad usus.44
As when a spirited horse who has long yearned for war now at last braves arms,
seeks battle and joyously drinks in wounds, the shouts of men and the blare of
bugles; he rouses his anger, and his breast unconquered in the perils of battle
swells along with its trusty companion, courage: so he would like to rush fearlessly
at once into the midst of the enemy; and yet, readily obedient to the rein, he
waits; and meanwhile slows his fierce pace, and prances back and forth around the
battle lines, still mildly obedient to his rider, and his reins. But when he feels
the reins slacken on his mane and the spurs all along his side, and realizes what his
Master wants, he charges at the enemy through bristling weapons, flashing
swords, and flashing blasts of certain death: and whatever fear brandishes itself
before his eyes and ears, he rejects all weakness of spirit, all cowardice of heart. But
if no weapons summon him then he is content to wheel in circles, or chase
goats, amusing himself in pointless sport, and passes a peaceful life without glory
with his Master, and lowers his aspirations to unwarlike ends.

This is a vision of Virgil’s ideal horse in its maturity: initially selected for
his excited response to the sounds of battle (as in Virgil, G. 3.83–4), this
horse retains that enthusiasm, but is also perfectly controlled and obeys his
master unquestioningly (in fact, without even the reluctance of the horse at
G. 3.208, echoed so effectively by Vida). The following passage makes clear
that the good Christian, like this version of Virgil’s horse, must learn to
accept what he can and cannot achieve, and in which realms he is destined
to operate – even if those turn out not to be as glamorous or active as he
had hoped. Movingly, similar language recurs when Hume finally reveals
the significance of the poem’s title and turns, at line 428, to address his
baby son, Aseclanus. He tells him that he must focus above all on virtue
and self-control:
Alii quassata ruinis
Moenia Marte domant; tractasque in funera gentes:
Et dextram innocuo foedati sanguine turgent:
Tu vastos animos; et fervida corda; rebelles
Debellaque Deo motus: giroque coacta
Exerce imperiis victor.

44
Lines 243–61. Hume 1605: 93–4. Translation mine.
198 victoria moul
Let other men subdue walls shaken by battle, and bring nations to their destruc
tion; let them swell with pride, their hands stained with innocent blood. You must
conquer high spirits, an ardent heart, and passions that rebel against God, and,
having driven them in a circle, train them to your command like a victor.45

Both the structure of this passage and the word debella recall Anchises’
instructions to his son, Aeneas, when they meet in the Underworld in
Aeneid 6.847–53. But the language here – and especially the final lines, in
which the rebellious heart and soul are subject to training, and forced into
a circular manoeuvre (gyroque coacta, compare inflectere gyros at 258) – links
the young man Aselcanus will become with the Virgilian horse of the
centre of the poem.46 Just as that central simile was followed by Hume’s
expression of acceptance of whatever role in life God intends for him, so in
his final address to his son he carefully denies any authority to predict or
demand the kind of life Aseclanus should lead. In a touchingly positive
version of a priamel, Hume imagines many alternatives for his child –
whether a public life of politics, warfare or law; or a quiet private life with a
family; or even as a poet – and endorses them all, as long as his son remains
strong in his faith.
This unusual poem meditates movingly upon how best to reconcile
natural enthusiasm with piety and acceptance, relating the moral and
religious content to the author’s own life, and particularly the satisfac-
tions of a late marriage and the long-wished-for arrival of a first son.
With consistent direct instruction and a specific addressee, it is a didactic
poem by any measure; and although far removed from classical Latin
didactic poetry in many ways – diction, tone and versification are all
quite unlike the main classical models – Hume nevertheless echoes and
responds to the didactic shape (and educational associations) of Virgil’s
poem by placing a recognizably georgic horse at the heart of his verse
essay on human maturity. Hume’s version of Virgil’s horse neither
suppresses the reality of war, nor makes it the horse’s only purpose,
but instead accepts the existence of both war and peace, soldiers and
poets, to any full vision of human flourishing. Whereas Vida’s young
lawyer or statesman, for whom literature is a potent distraction from
worldly affairs, still remembers and yearns for the pleasures of Latin
poetry, Hume’s vision of full maturity has absorbed and transformed
the Virgil of his youth.

45
Hume 1605: 101.
46
The Latin word gyrus, ‘circle’, is used especially of the manoeuvres of a horse in Latin. See Virgil, G.
3.115 and 191.
 Didactic Poetry 199

FURTHER READING
For overview and discussion of the genre see Hofmann 1988b; IJsewijn and Sacré
1998: 24 45 and Haskell 2014a. On the earlier texts and Italian material in general,
see Roellenbleck 1975; on the imitation of Virgil’s Georgics see Ludwig 1988. See
Haskell 2003 and 2010 for Jesuit didactic poetry; Haskell 2013 on an Ovidian
didactic poet; Haskell 1998a, Pantin 1999 and Gee 2008 on astronomical poetry;
Haskell 2014b on medical didactic. Useful collections of essays include Haskell
and Hardie 1999; Harder et al. 2007; and Ruys 2008.
 chapter 12

Epic
Paul Gwynne

Unlike rhetoric, no antique treatise on epic survives. Although the

Aristotelian tradition stipulated the same unity of time and place as tragedy
and Horace defined epic as ‘the deeds of kings and generals and the
sorrows of war’ (Ars poetica, 73), no formal theory of epic was disseminated
until the sixteenth century.1 Virgil remained the paradigm although
Lucretius’ De rerum natura and Ovid’s Metamorphoses had already strayed
beyond the theme of ‘arms and the man’. For the purposes of this essay,
however, ‘epic’ will be limited to narrative poetry on the deeds of heroes,
consisting of multiple books and written in hexameter, between the
twelfth and eighteenth centuries.
Whilst we now speak of neo-Latin epic because Jacob Burckhardt claimed
the genre had been reinvented by Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch), epic did not
in fact die with the fall of the western empire. It continued to prosper
vicariously through panegyric, thanks to its early reception as a mode of
encomium.2 Fourth-century critics retrospectively interpreted the Aeneid as
an epic in praise of Augustus, and poets now acted upon this interpretation.3
Indeed, Claudian (c. 370–404 ce), court poet to Honorius (emperor
393–423), was so successful at accommodating panegyric into the epic
tradition that his verses were publicly proclaimed a synthesis of ‘Virgilian
discretion and Homeric invention’.4 A rich and unbroken tradition of
panegyric-epic consequently thrived throughout the Middle Ages, adding
biblical and Christian motifs to the classical repertoire.5 Poets now myth-
ologized contemporary events in epic terms.6 In Merovingian Gaul bishop
Venantius Fortunatus (c. 530–600/609) composed panegyric verse replete

1
For some ideas on late antique theory see Koster 1970; Hofmann 1988a.
2
For epic and epideictic see Hardison 1962: 40–8; Vickers 1983; Gwynne 2012.
3 4
Kallendorf 1989. Cameron 1970: 404.
5
Kantorowicz 1946. A separate tradition of religious panegyric of saints also evolved: O’Malley 1979:
36–76. Ebenhauer 1978.
6
Chiri 1939.

200
 Epic 201
with epic motifs: while at the Byzantine court his contemporary, Flavius
Cresconius Corippus, composed an epic in eight books on Justinian’s cam-
paigns against the Berber tribes of North Africa; and a four-book panegyrical
epic on the emperor Justin II (565–78).7 During the later Middle Ages the
so-called ‘historical epic’ flourished. These long Latin poems were based
upon historical events and written by poets who lived close to the period
they were describing. Karolus Rex et Leo Papa (early ninth century, some-
times ascribed to Einhard) dealt with Charlemagne’s relationship with Pope
Leo III. In the tenth century an anonymous Italian poet, taking verses from
Virgil, Juvenal and Statius, celebrated the emperor Berengar (crowned 915)
in four books as though he were a hero of antiquity.8 In the thirteenth
century Gilles of Paris (1200) presented his Carolinus on Charlemagne to
Prince Louis of France, while William the Breton composed his long epic
the Philippeis (c. 1225) in praise of Philip Augustus.9
Nonetheless, since Burckhardt it has been traditional both to see
discontinuity in epic writing and also to date its revival to Petrarch’s Africa
(1337–43).10 This is doubly problematic: although Petrarch maintained the
traditional decorum by returning to a classical subject, his Africa is only
another episode in the tradition of ‘panegyrical epic’, one again derived
from an epideictic reading of Virgil; secondly, it is the Alexandreis of
Walter of Châtillon (c. 1135–c. 1189), ten books on Alexander the Great
written nearly two centuries earlier, that most nourished the early modern
vogue for classicizing epic.

The Alexandreis and the Africa

The Africa was famous but without significant following.11 The Alexandreis
instead became so staple a text in the schools that it even challenged the
primacy of classical poets as the object of grammatical study.12 While more
than two hundred manuscripts of the Alexandreis survive, many with
copious glosses, there are only twenty-three of the Africa, many fragmentary.
Moreover, the editio princeps of the Alexandreis (Rouen, 1487) appeared
fourteen years before the Africa (Venice, 1501) and it continued in print
until the eighteenth century.

7 8 9
George 1992; Cameron 1976. Raby 1934: i, 279–83. Raby 1934: ii, 343.
10
Burckhardt 1960: 194; Warner 2008: 1–19. Modern editors have begun to look beyond Petrarch: for
example, Haye 2009: 120–23.
11
Nichols notes that Petrarch was honoured more as ‘a pioneer than as a model’. Nichols 1979: 26. See
also Fera 1984.
12
Colker 1978: xx.
202 paul gwynne
Walter of Châtillon’s poem recounts the campaigns of Alexander the
Great (356–23 bce), from Persia to India, and up to his death. He discards
the fantasy that had pervaded the Alexander Romances for the facts in the
first-century Vita Alexandri by Curtius Rufus, and draws stylistically not
only upon Virgil but also Lucan, Ovid, and Claudian, ensuring that they
would remain the touchstones of all future epic poetry.13 In his quest for
authenticity, Walter even goes so far as to imitate the critical apparatus that
had accumulated around ancient texts, for each book begins with an exposi-
tory headnote that summarizes and interprets its contents. All the epic
themes are treated: dynasty, destiny, war and travel. Nonetheless, Walter’s
characterization of Alexander offers a critique of classical heroism and hence
the core of inherited epic. This becomes clear when Alexander relentlessly
pursues Darius from the battlefield of Arbala (Alexandreis 5.307–10) in the
vain hope of killing the king in single combat and thereby achieving the
aristeia (‘deeds of excellence’) of the classical heroes. For Walter, Alexander’s
determination reveals a flaw in character, and the verse summary to Book i
remarks that Alexander’s pursuit of boundless empire and glory is a product
of hubris: Elatusque animo sub sole iacentia regna / Iam sibi parta putat (‘Soul-
proud, he thinks the realms of all the world are his’; italics mine. Capitula
primi libri, 7–8), a line that recalls the second temptation of Christ. While
Jesus replies ‘Get thee behind me Satan’, Alexander relentlessly pursues
world domination, a tragic flaw that will eventually cause his death.14
Nature, wary that she will succumb to Alexander’s ambitions for world
empire, warns Leviathan, identified as Satan, that Alexander will conquer
the Underworld as well (10.82–108). Leviathan, fearful that Alexander is
the hero foretold to trample the gates of Hell (compare Pluto’s anxiety in
Stat. Theb. 8.21–83), suborns Alexander’s alienated lieutenants into plot-
ting against his life. This narrative device not only allows the Alexandreis to
conclude with Alexander’s death (at the very point when the fantastic
voyages recounted in medieval legend begin), but also to contrast this
pagan hero yet again with Christ. Alexander’s spirit exivit in auras (‘flies to
heaven’s air’, 10.427), but not to Heaven. The moral is that dum fallax
gloria rerum / Mortales oculos vanis circumvolat alis, (‘around our mortal
eyes deceitful glory / of action flies on wings of vanity’, 10.437–38). In
other words, while Alexander fulfils all the criteria for a classical hero, his

13
Rainier Carsughi (1647–1709), lecturer at the Jesuit Collegio Romano, advised his students to resist
the temptations of Lucan, Statius and Claudian in favour of Virgil (see Haskell 2010: 203), testifying
to their lasting influence.
14
Colker 1978; translation Townsend 2007.
 Epic 203
moral failings also make him an exemplum vanitatis (i.e. of vainglory).
Indeed, Walter’s contemporary Henry of Avranches (d. 1260), who com-
posed a fourteen-book epic on the life of Saint Francis, claimed that his
pacifist hero was greater than Walter’s military one, for he not only
conquered the world but also overcame his own passions.15
Petrarch faced similar problems, and failed to resolve them, in his Africa,
an unfinished epic, based on Livy, that heroizes Scipio Africanus’ role in the
Second Punic War (218–201 bce). Perhaps conceiving him as an antidote to
Walter’s Alexander, Petrarch presents Scipio as a pagan paragon of virtue
not inconsistent with Christian values. This is particularly evident in Book
iv where Scipio’s lieutenant Lelius lists the general’s physical prowess and
moral excellence (Africa, 4.46–55). The verse translation by Bergin and
Wilson is more than faithful to the hyperbole of the original:
Nulli umquam Natura viro tam larga fuisse
Creditur. Ethereo corpus splendore nitescit;
Imperiosa ducem frons arguit, aspera blandum,
Unde simul vibrant unum duo lumina fulmen,
Quod nullus sufferre queat. Coma densa per armos
Protinus ad solem ventis ferientibus aurum
Explicat impexum, quoniam cassisque sudorque
Et labor assiduus prohibent animusque modesto
Contentus cultumque timens transisse virilem.
Celsior est aliis.
(Africa, 4. 46 55)
Never, ’tis said, to any man before
has nature shown such bounty. From him flows
a rare ethereal aura, and his brow,
whence two yoked flashes hurl a single bolt
that no man may sustain, makes manifest
in tranquil majesty the worthy chief.
Over his shoulders his luxuriant locks
expose their gold to sun and wind dishevelled:
for burden of the helm and sweat of toil
assiduous and constant, and a mind
content with simple things, make him eschew
refinements unbecoming to a man.
Tall above other men he stands.16
This descriptio pulchritudinis (‘a catalogue of beauty’), once reserved only
for women, is here remade into an homoerotic blazon and becomes the

15 16
Avranches 1926: 1.11–15. Bergin and Wilson 1977: 70–1.
204 paul gwynne
prelude to a pious inventory of Scipio’s moral qualities. For modern critics,
the perfection of Scipio’s healthy mind and healthy body is only one
reason why the Africa is ultimately so unrewarding. The central hero is
merely a cipher, ‘too perfect a synthesis of Roman warrior and Christian
saint to be credible’.17
While some episodes, such as the doomed tryst of Massinissa and
Sophonisba, mirror the passionate intensity of Dido and Aeneas or Paolo
and Francesca, overall the pagan form and Christian purpose never really
cohere. The nadir of this conflict is when Jupiter foresees the future and
absurdly predicts his own reincarnation as Christ born of the Virgin (Africa,
7.710–24). The incompatibility of the traditional cast of deities with the
singularity of the Christian God is a fault line that runs through most neo-
Latin epic, but it ruptures the unity of Petrarch’s project. Indeed, the Africa
proved too much for its author. Even though Petrarch successfully canvassed
King Robert of Sicily to endorse his laureation in Rome (1341) with the
promise of its imminent publication, he eventually abandoned the work.
Petrarch may have predicted a poetic triumph to compare with Scipio’s
victory over Hannibal, but as the years rolled by only selected passages
were ever circulated, and then only to friends.18 The reception of even
these fragments was far from enthusiastic.19 Indeed, no poet after Petrarch
would choose a figure from Roman history as their hero. Instead patriot-
ism, national or local loyalties (real or ideal), and the search for a patron
would dictate the choice of subject matter.

Encomiastic Epic in the Fifteenth Century

The fifteenth century was a dynamic period for epic. It began with
Homer’s translation into Latin, and ended with printed editions of the
Iliad and Odyssey in the original Greek.20 The discovery of manuscripts of
Lucretius and Silius Italicus (1417) made their works accessible for the first
time in 1500 years and augmented the canon. If that were not enough,
poets also set about filling the lacunae in the literary remnants. In 1428,

17
Mann 1984: 51. In the final book, however, Petrarch has Homer predict to Ennius, no less, the
advent of the supreme epic poet – that is, Petrarch himself (Africa 9.229–36).
18
The editio princeps was first published in Petrarch’s Opera latina at Venice in 1501; see Bernardo
1962: 175–6.
19
In Leonardo Bruni’s dialogues on contemporary culture (c. 1402–3) Niccolò Niccoli launches an
acerbic attack on Petrarch’s poem: ‘Nothing was ever announced with such a fanfare as Petrarch
heralded his Africa . . . But then what? Such a fanfare brought forth only a derisory squeak!’ Dialogi
ad Petrum Paulum Histrum, 1.48, in Bruni 1994.
20
See Wilson 1992.
 Epic 205
Maffeo Vegio supplemented Virgil with a thirteenth book of his own
composition (editio princeps, Venice 1471) – which now culminated with
the apotheosis of Aeneas – and the challenge continued to be accepted
until Thomas May virtually doubled the length of Lucan’s incomplete
Bellum Civile (1640).21 These ‘complete’ texts composed the most import-
ant Continental editions for nearly two hundred years, and the continu-
ations were hardly distinguished from the originals. Concurrently, classical
epic became the subject of humanist lectures and the texts received
philological commentaries that were just as influential in their own right.22
Neo-Latin epic flourished as never before. Long hexameter poems that cast
contemporary potentates as classical heroes looked back to Lucan’s claim
that the poets could bestow immortality on their subjects, in life and
beyond (9.980–1). As a result, in the words of John Addington Symonds:
Our ears are deafened with eulogies of petty patrons transformed into
Maecenases, of carpet knights compared with Leonidas, of tyrants made
equal with Augustus, of generals who never looked on bloodshed tricked
out as Hannibals or Scipios.23

To pick just four examples from the vast catalogue attesting to the
explosion in popularity of such encomiastic epic among the condot-
tieri and signorie of Renaissance Italy we may cite: the Sphortias (an unfin-
ished epic in ten books on the deeds of Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan)
by Francesco Filelfo (1398–1481); the Feltria (nine books on the deeds of
Federigo da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino) by Gianantonio de Porcellio
Pandoni (c. 1409–c. 1485); the Hesperis (thirteen books on Sigismondo
Malatesta’s two campaigns against Naples in 1448 and 1453) by Basinio
Basini (1425–57); and the Borsias (ten books on Borso D’Este, Duke of
Ferrara) by Tito Vespasiano Strozzi (1424–1505). The reception of these
works, however, was not always as the poets had hoped.24 Following
Petrarch’s example, Filelfo used the potential of his epic to promote his
career at the Sforza court, but disappointed by Sforza indifference sent
selected books to other patrons. After the sudden death of Borso d’Este,
Strozzi refashioned his Borsias into a general celebration of the D’Este
family. In the latter case, this accident of fortune initiated a new trend in
dynastic epic that was fulfilled in the vernacular epic compositions of
Boiardo and Ariosto.

21
Bradner 1940: 71–2; Kallendorf 2014b, in Ford, Bloemendal and Fantazzi, 1118–9.
22 23 24
For example, Calderini 2011. Symonds 1875: ii, 375. Gwynne and Shirg 2015.
206 paul gwynne
Nor was the new encomiastic epic confined to Italy. In the 1440s, for
example, Tito Livio dei Frulovisi composed the Humfroidos in honour of
Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. At the end of the century Johannes
Michael Nagonius, an itinerant poet in the service of the Borgia papacy,
travelled from Buda to London presenting deluxe manuscripts to the
crowned heads of Europe that heroized each dedicatee, though always
with the covert intention of making them agents of papal foreign policy.25
It is hardly surprising that demand for such epic flattery swelled amongst
the ruling elites of Europe and that the taste would endure into the
eighteenth century. Over eighty epics were produced during the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries in France alone.26
It is surprising that the epic encomia of such renowned rivals and
patrons of the arts as Federigo da Montefeltro and Sigismondo Malatesta
remain unpublished. The portrait that Federigo commissioned from Pedro
Berruguete for his exquisite studiolo shows him clad in armour but reading
a hefty tome, like Porcellio’s Feltria, which begins:
Magnanimum fidumque Ducem pia signa gerentem,
Qui Soram et Marsos domuit gentemque Sabellam,
Quique Sigismundi superatis agmine turmis,
Flamineasque arces, Picenaque regna subegit,
Ordiar.
I will describe the noble and loyal general who carries the insignia of the Church;
he tamed Sora, the Marsii and the Savelli and, when Sigismondo’s forces had
been routed by his army, conquered the Flaminian citadels and the strongholds
around Piceno.27

To choose ordiar as the first main verb is telling. It was the word first
uttered in Silius Italicus’ Punica and implies that the territorial squabbles
between the Montefeltro and Malatesta are on a par with the life-or-death
struggle between Rome and Carthage. The rest of the poem is a litany of
combat and carnage, that passes over the fact that it was this ‘new Caesar’
who blew an Augustan triumphal arch to smithereens at the siege of Fano.
Shorter epics might concentrate on just one campaign, making the
besieged city as much the locus of epic as Troy had been for Homer and
as unified a stage for action as Aristotle had wished.28 The Volaterrais, a

25 26
Gwynne 2012. Braun 2007.
27
Porcellio, Feltria, BAV, Urb. lat. 373, fol. 1br, Bk 1, 1–4; translation mine.
28
For example, Fuscus Paracletus Cornetanus De Malvetiis (1408–87), Tarentina (1460–5) four books
on the Barons’ war; Pierre de Blarru (1437–1510), Nanceid (printed posthumously in 1518), centres
upon the victory of René, Duke of Lorraine over Charles, Duke of Burgundy, at the siege of Nancy
 Epic 207
four-book epic by Naldo de’ Naldi (c. 1432–1513) on the war between
Florence and Volterra (1472) opens with a panegyric on the golden age in
Florence under Medici rule, contrasting it with the internal dissents of
Volterra, the subject of the poem:
Est urbs, Etruscis quae pulchrior exstat in oris,
Sullanus primae cui miles originis auctor
quamque tenent orti Romano a sanguine Patres.
ex re nomen habet: nam cum modo floreat illa,
felix prole virum atque opibus ditata supremis,
omnibus est proprio Florentia nomine dicta.29
(Naldi, Volaterrais, 1. 15 20)
There is a rather beautiful city that stands in the Tuscan region, which claims the
soldier Sulla as the founder of its first origins and over which senators born from
Roman stock hold sway. It derives its name from its prosperity; for since that city,
happy in its race of men and enriched with extraordinary wealth, may only
flourish, it is named by everyone Florence.
This laus urbis is actually a pretext for the poet to absolve Florence from
any guilt in the ensuing war and eventual sack of Volterra (related in
Book iii), and instead attribute this sordid incident to the goddess Envy’s
ire at the prosperity of Florence.
The work concludes (Book iv) with a brief account of Federigo’s
triumphant return to Florence before launching into an interminable,
reported oration (42–446) reminding us of the condottiere’s accomplish-
ments in both war and peace. Although this poem was written in the hope
of further patronage, Federigo ignored Naldi’s pleas for support. He did,
however, have the Volterrais, together with Porcellio’s Feltria and other
works celebrating him, copied for his magnificent library.

Neo-Latin Epic Warfare

While condottieri like Federigo aspired to become a latter-day Achilles or
Caesar, the poets had to struggle with the realities of modern warfare. So
powerful was the impact of artillery and firearms that the old gods quickly
seemed impotent without them. Eventually we will even be confronted in
a later epic, Charles Garnier’s vernacular Henriade (1593–4) on Henry IV
of France, with the curious spectacle of Mars striding across the battlefield

in 1477; the twelve-book Mutineis by Francesco Rococciolo (c. 1460/70–1528) celebrates the defence
of the Modenese against papal, French and Imperial incursions; see Gwynne 2016b.
29
All quotations are from Grant 1974.
208 paul gwynne
armed with a pistol. More importantly, the pervasive presence of long-
range weapons made the heroic ethos of the aristeia (in which heroes
demonstrate their prowess in single-handed combat) increasingly irrele-
vant, and eventually impossible. Try as they might, it was a task to blend
gunsmoke and firearms into epic. The soldier-poet Francesco Sperulo, who
left an epic account of his service with Cesare Borgia, ranted against the
cowardice of snipers: ‘Alas! the timid and cowardly lay low brave hearts
and with an anonymous shot from a distance they send renowned warriors
to the shades below.’30
The distinction between fighting at close quarters (cominus) or at a
distance (eminus) is a feature of neo-Latin epic that was absent in its
classical forebears. Paris had earned eternal opprobrium for killing Achilles
at a distance when Apollo guided his arrow (Ov. Met. 12.580–611), and in
neo-Latin epic those who cheat, those who ignore the chivalric code, use
guns. Gunpowder was satanic. It stole God’s thunder, and Ariosto,
Spenser and Milton have the Devil invent gunpowder and devise artil-
lery.31 In the 1520s Marco Girolamo Vida’s Christiad tellingly compares the
firing of a cannonball with the explosive response of the demonically
inspired Sanhedrin to Nicodemus’ defence of Christ:
Qualiter aere cavo, dum sulfura pascitur atra,
inclusus magis atque magis furit acrior ignis
moliturque fugam, nec se capit intus anhelans,
nulla sed angustis foribus via, nec potis extra
rumpere, materiam donec comprenderit omnem;
tum piceo disclusa volat glans ferrea fumo.
Fit crepitus: credas rupto ruere aethere coelom.
Iamque illa et turres procul ecce stravit et arces;
corpora et arma iacent late et via facta per hostes.
Haud illi secus accensi meliora momentum
excludunt adytis atque extra moenia trudunt.
(Christiad, 2, 203 15)

As when poisonous sulphur consumes itself within the chamber of a bronze

cannon, the confined fire rages with ever greater force. Hissing and seeking to
break out, it can no longer contain itself, yet it has no avenue of escape through
the narrow channels of the bore, no means of freeing itself, until all the matter is
consumed. Then amid pitchy smoke, the iron bullet discharges and takes wing
with a thunderous sound. You would think that the sky had split open and the

30
BAV, Vat. lat. 5205, fol. 23r. Translation mine see Gwynne 2015: 2, 33. Sperulo is here voicing a
complaint that would soon become commonplace.
31
Orlando Furioso, 9.91; Faerie Queene, 1.7.13; Paradise Lost, 6.469–608.
 Epic 209

heavens were falling! And behold, the cannonball has laid waste to distant towers
and fortifications, bodies and weapons lie scattered everywhere, and a path has
been cut through the enemy camp! Even so were the elders in Jerusalem incensed
against Nicodemus, though he gave them wise counsel. And so they expelled him
from the temple and harried him beyond the walls of the city.32
The intrusion of gunpowder warfare into epic was not only a thematic
challenge. The mechanics of gunfire clearly taxed poets’ linguistic skills
too. In a strained circumlocution Sperulo refers to bullets as plumbique a
sulphure glandes contortae (lit. ‘acorns of lead whirled violently by sul-
phur’).33 Some poets scoured the treatises of Vitruvius and Vegetius for
technical terms which could be adopted or, more often, invested with
fresh meanings; others simply Latinized contemporary words, jarring
humanist sensibilities. Compare, for example, the bitter debate surround-
ing the use of the neologism bombardus over the classical term
tormentum.34

Neo-Latin Epic and the Fall of Constantinople

The fall of Constantinople in May 1453 sent shock waves across the
Mediterranean. In the postscript to his four-book epic Contantinopoleos
(c. 1455–64) Ubertino Pusculo claimed that he witnessed the siege.35 His
poem concludes with a dramatic description of the city’s fall:
Femineis resonant ululatibus omnia tecta,
Diripiunt domos Teucri, sacrataque templa,
Thesauros rapiunt veteres; puerique puellae
Et matres, pulchraeque nurus in castra trahuntur.
(Pusculo, Constantinopoleos, 4. 1056 9)

Every building echoes with the screams of women, the Trojans (i.e., the
Turks) sack the homes and holy churches and carry off the ancient treasures;
boys and girls, wives and beautiful young women are dragged off to the enemy
camps.36

32
Vida 2009: 74–5.
33
BAV, Vat. lat. 5812, fol. 12v. Girolamo Fracastoro’s description of the workings of an arquebus,
apropos a parrot shoot by Columbus’ men on the island of Hispaniola, is even more convoluted
(Syphilis, 3.160–69). Eatough 1984: 94–5.
34
Valla 1981: 157–60; in response, at the beginning of his Decades Biondo Flavio justified his use of
neologisms (such as ‘bombardus’ for ‘canon’) arguing that ancient terminology often proved
inadequate for modern developments in warfare.
35
Me Constantini studiis urbs dulcis habebat, / Cum cecidit bello: barbara praeda fui. (I was studying in
Constantine’s delightful city when it fell in war; I was savage booty), Pusculo 1857: 83.
36
Pusculo 1857: 82.
210 paul gwynne
As the Turks pushed North and West in search of further conquests, the call
for a crusade echoed across Europe. Not surprisingly, this summons imme-
diately appears in epic. The four-book Amyris (1471–6) by Gian Maria
Filelfo documents the Turkish advance and culminates with an appeal to
Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza of Milan to lead a crusade of united Christian
princes against Mehmed II.37 The Alfonseis (a ten-book epic on Alfonso
V ‘the Magnanimous’) by Matteo Zuppardo (c. 1400–57) is similarly
themed around the promotion of a crusade, and features John Hunyadi’s
spirited defence of Belgrade (July 1455, Book iv; July 1456, Book ix).38
Unlike other epics which were written with the benefit of hindsight and
from historical records (such as Naldi’s Volaterrais) Zuppardo’s poem was
composed as events unfolded and news from Albania reached the Neapol-
itan court. This accounts for the curious, episodic nature of the poem,
which began as an occasional piece celebrating both Alfonso’s plans to lead a
crusade and also the dynastic marriage between the houses of Sforza and
Aragon (Books i–iii). Into this narrative the poet has woven an account of
the contemporary Neapolitan–Genovese conflict (Books vi–viii) and an
excursus upon Achilles’ retreat to the island of Skyros (Book v). The latter is
intended both to complete Statius’ unfinished Achilleid and also suggest that
the Neapolitans are heirs to the Greeks who had conquered the Trojans
(because their descendants are here again identified as Turks).
Zuppardo’s Alfonseis pitches the conflict between the two armies at the
walls of Belgrade as an apocalyptic struggle between Good and Evil. While
the Turks forlornly call upon a Mohammed that Zuppardo tells us is
chained in Hell (Alfonseis, 9.94–103), John Hunyadi’s rousing speech to
the Christian troops reaches fever pitch in John of Capestrano’s vision of
Christ leading the heavenly squadrons:
Spero equidem, non falsa fides, non gloria fallit,
maxima cum nostra veniet victoria laude.
Ipse Capistranus Christum vidisse fatetur
etherea regione crucem et vexilla gerentem
pluraque, que hortantur letas ad bella cohortes
currere et infestas acies consurgere in hostes.
(Zuppardo, Alfonseis, 9.191 96)
I indeed hope, neither false faith nor glory deceives, the greatest victory will come
with our praise. Capestrano himself says that he has seen Christ carrying the cross
and many standards in the heavens, which encourage the happy cohorts to race
into battle and the hostile battlelines to rise up against the enemy.39

37 38 39
Filelfo 1978. Zuppardo 1990. Translation mine.
 Epic 211
This vision is echoed at the victorious conclusion of the battle when Hunya-
di’s attempt to enter into single combat with the Turkish leader is curtailed by
an angel (9.333–47). Although Hunyadi is denied his aristeia, the angel
predicts a sequel in which Alfonso V will instead have this satisfaction. While
both the Alfonseis and the victory it celebrates were short-lived successes, by
presenting a contemporary ruler in the guise of a crusading knight, invested
with all the paraphernalia of epic, this poem looks forward to the poetry that
would be written to celebrate the naval victory at Lepanto (1571).
The Alfonseis also offered a solution to one of the core quandaries of
neo-Latin epic, the continuing Christian disquiet over the true motivations
for military heroism. As the secular epic tremored and buckled under a hail
of bullets, the pagan apparatus of epic was gradually Christianized and,
almost inevitably, centred around a crusading motif. Thus, the fifteen-
book Carlias of Ugolino Verino (1438–1510) resuscitated the heroic ethos
only by taking as its theme Charlemagne’s conquests from the Holy Land
to Italy. Charlemagne is ‘without rival in deed or religion’ and Verino’s
preface tells us: ‘This work is manifold, distinguished as much by its poetic
tropes as it is ornamented with the mysteries of the Christian faith.’40
Verino’s Carlias was written over a long period, and redraughted in
1493 with a dedication to Charles VIII of France, with the intention of
presenting it to the king as he passed down the Italian peninsula to invade
Naples. Charles had justified his invasion of the Italian peninsula by claiming
that his plans for the conquest of the Kingdom of Naples were only the first
step in a crusade aimed at wresting the Mediterranean from the Turks and
recapturing the Holy Land. At a moment in European history when actual
crusade was merely a fantasy, the spurious idea that Charlemagne had once
conquered the Holy Land was a provocation. As the dedication spells out, the
Carlias meant to inspire Charles VIII to emulate his ancestor and namesake.
As in Chatillon’s Alexandreis, a series of verse summaries explain the
contents of each book. Verino too includes every epic trope he can muster:
he begins in medias res; there are banquets, journeys, storms at sea, great
battles, and councils of war. The only real innovation is that the katabasis
(voyage to the Underworld) now imitates Dante’s Divine Comedy. Charle-
magne not only travels through the Underworld (Book vi), but continues
on to Purgatory (Book vii), and eventually Paradise (Book viii), where
the Virgin Mary, echoing Anchises’ words to Aeneas (Aen. 6.851–53),
affirms Charlemagne’s destiny in the presence of the Almighty:

40
Verino 1995. Translation mine. The Carlias has recently begun to attract attention, see Thurn 2002
and references in Gwynne, Hodges and Vroom 2014.
212 paul gwynne
Ne timeas auctore Deo discrimen adire,
Quodcunque occurrit; sevosque abolere tyrannos
Ars erit ista tibi; et iustis des libera iura;
Maumettique luem et virus quodcunque nefandum
Evelles, Christo ut soli tribuantur honores.
(Verino, Carlias, 8.674 78)
Fear not entering battle with God as your guide, wherever that may be; you will
make an art of destroying savage tyrants; you shall give free laws to the just; you
shall expunge every plague and abominable stench of Mohammed, so that all
honour will be rendered to Christ alone.
The Virgin endorses Charlemagne’s victories and encourages him with pre-
dictions of future greatness while the angels applaud. Her prediction of course
applies as much to Charles VIII, and the Virgin’s words are therefore a
summons to crusade. This convenient device not only allows the poet to lay
any responsibility for the ensuing war and slaughter on the Almighty Himself,
but it also absolves Charlemagne from any charge of vainglory by suggesting
that his accomplishment resides in complete submission to God’s will and the
exercise of Christian duty. Actual combat is not something that the hero seeks
for its own sake. The result, however, is an unsuccessful compromise. The
Christian motifs are tired and hang awkwardly from the epic framework. The
battle scenes, like the fights in the chansons de geste upon which they are based,
are repetitive and dull, unrelieved bouts of ‘walloping and carving’, to borrow
Graham Hough’s memorable phrase.41

Italian Epic of the Sixteenth Century

In Italy, the crisis of secular epic coincided with the election of Giovanni
de’ Medici as Pope Leo X (1513–21). Poets greeted his reign as a new
Golden Age. The new pope in return demanded a biblical epic written
in elegant humanistic Latin that could rival the pagan prototypes and
eclipse the rough Latin of the first Christian poets.42 Although Leo did not
live to see their completion he encouraged the two most famous poems in
this genre, the De Partu Virginis by Iacopo Sannazaro (1458–1530) and the
Christiad by Marco Girolamo Vida (1485–1566).
Sannazaro’s poem treats the mystery of the Virgin Birth. The historical
progression from Annunciation (Book i), through Visitation (Book ii), to
Journey to Bethlehem (Book iii) is paralleled by a subplot revealed in
prophetic utterances (by King David in Book i; by Proteus in Book ii and

41 42
Hough 1962: 184. Green 2006: 351–72.
 Epic 213
the River Jordan in Book iii) narrating the life of Christ: preaching to
the elders, the Passion and triumph in Book i; birth in Book ii; baptism
and miracles in Book iii. This poem has sharply divided opinion. Critics
from Erasmus to Symonds found the classical language inappropriate to
the Christian subject, whereas two modern editors praise the Virgilian
hexameters as ‘marvellously beautiful’.43 Yet this is a curiously static poem,
a series of tableaux and speeches composed more for contemplation and
devotion than any narrative impetus.44 The overall effect is more of
pastoral tranquillity than epic grandeur. As Thomas Greene has said, it is
‘a pageant rather than a drama’.45
The Christiad of Marco Girolamo Vida is quite different. Although
both poems take the Incarnation as their central theme, the Christiad
expands, through predictions and flashbacks, to encompass the whole of
time from the Creation and Fall to the Last Judgement. The portrayal
of the Virgin at the Crucifixion reveals Sannazaro’s and Vida’s differing
approaches to their subject matter.
The description of Virgin at the Crucifixion in the New Testament is
virtually telegraphic in its brevity: ‘Now there stood by the cross of Jesus
his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Cleophas, and Mary
Magdalene’ (John 19:25). By contrast Sannazaro elaborates the scene at
some length:
At mater, non iam mater sed flentis et orbae
infelix simulacrum, aegra ac sine viribus umbra,
ante crucem demissa genas, effusa capillum,
stat lacrimans tristique irrorat pectora fletu.
Ac si iam comperta mihi licet ore profari
omnia, defessi spectans morientia nati
lumina, crudeles terras, crudelia dicit
sidera, crudelem se se, quod talia cernat
vulnera, saepe vocat.
(Sannazaro, De partu Virginis, 1.333 41)
But his mother, no longer mother but wretched spectre, weeping and bereft, a
sickened, feeble shadow, stands in tears before the cross. Her face is lowered, her
hair outspread. She dampens her breast with a flood of sadness. And, if I can now
give voice to all that I have discovered, as she gazes at the dying eyes of her

43
Perosa and Sparrow 1979: 142.
44
The golden age of pastoral is made eternal through the birth of Christ; for the rifacimento of Virgil’s
so-called ‘messianic eclogue’ to accommodate the angels’ hymn above the nativity, see Sannazaro
2009: 370–75.
45
Greene 1973: 158. See also Kennedy 1983: 180–224.
214 paul gwynne
exhausted son, she calls the earth cruel, the stars cruel. Over and over she calls
herself cruel because she bears witness to wounds such as these.46
Sannazaro’s phraseology combines reference to the hymn Stabat Mater
with echoes of Virgil’s Eclogues (5.23; 8.48–50). Sannazaro inserts the
diacope at mater, iam non mater within an antithesis in the same line
(at mater . . . et orbae). The result is an elegance and balance that is
somewhat at odds with the brutality of the Crucifixion.47 This inventio
pervades the passage, for example in the use of annominatio (repeating a
word but varying its inflection every time) – crudeles, crudelia, crudelem –
that may imitate the Virgin’s hiccupping sobs. But such flourishes elicit
literary appreciation rather than any real pathos.
Vida’s presentation of the same scene is far more direct:
Ut vero informi mulctatum funere natum
affixumque trabi media iam in morte teneri
aspexit coram infelix, ut vidit ahena
cuspide traiectas palmas palmasque pedesque,
vulnificisque genas foedataque tempora sertis,
squalentem ut barbam, turpatum ut sanguine crinem,
deiectosques oculos dura iam in morte natantes,
inque humerum lapsos vultus morientiaque ora,
Alpino stetit ut cautes in vertice surgens,
quam neque concutiunt venti neque saeva trisulco
fulmine vis coeli, assiduus neque diluit imber
hispida, cana gelu longoque immobilis aevo.
(Vida, Christiad, 5.815 26)
But when the poor woman saw her son face to face, punished with shameful death
and nailed to the cross half dead, when she saw his hands and feet pierced by
brazen nails and his cheeks and his temples bloodied by thorns, his beard filthy
and his hair rank with gore, when she saw his downcast eyes already swooning in
cruel death and his dying face slumped onto his shoulder, she stood like a cliff on
an Alpine mountain top craggy, white with frost, immutable through long
ages which neither the winds nor the blast of the three pronged lightning can
shake, nor the driving rain.48
The planctus Mariae lies generally behind both descriptions. What is more
telling is the authors’ choice of Virgilian genres as their model. Sannazaro

46
Sannazaro 2009: 24–5.
47
Variant readings to the text demonstrate that Sannazaro deliberately suppressed the violence of
Christ’s suffering to concentrate instead upon the lamentation of Mary at the foot of the cross, see
Fantazzi 1997: 231–48.
48
Vida 2009: 304–7.
 Epic 215
looks to Virgil’s Eclogues, Vida the Aeneid. Sannazaro’s figures are docile
echoes of pastoral song, Vida seeks out the most shocking imagery of epic.
Thus, when Vida evokes the gory cadaver of Hector as he appears in a
dream to Aeneas (Aen. 2.274–79), he ignores the example of Homer, who
had Apollo preserve Hector’s body incorrupt until Priam could redeem it
for honourable burial, in favour of Virgil, where Hector’s ghost still bears
all the grisly scars of his duel with Achilles. This choice allows Vida to
contrast the grim spectacle of tortured flesh with the splendour of Christ’s
resurrected body.

Neo-Latin Epic: The Battle of Lepanto and Beyond

By the time that these two poems were eventually presented to Pope
Clement VII Christendom was fractured by the Reformation. In a Europe
divided, however successful Vida’s reformation of classical epic in Chris-
tian terms it could no longer claim a unified audience or speak in universal
terms. The subject that proved an exception was the Battle of Lepanto
(1571), the last great naval encounter powered by oars. Vanquishing the
common enemy, the Turk that menaced all Europe, once more provided
an opportunity to celebrate ‘arms and the man’.49
The Bellum Turcum (published 1573) by Bernardino Leo recounts the
battle in two books (1683 hexameters).50 Book i begins with the Turkish
incursions in the eastern Mediterranean and culminates in a lengthy
catalogue of the allied Catholic fleet of Venetian, Spanish and Papal vessels
and their respective captains (1.441–839). This is obviously modelled upon
the description of the Achaian armada in Homer (Iliad 2.484–760) and
again equates the Turks with the Trojans. Between these episodes an
interesting digression presents a debate on the true faith between a
Muslim, a Jew and a Christian at the court of Selim II in Constantinople
(ll.268–335); naturally, the solid faith of the Catholic priest in this ‘great
trial of religious faith’ (magna sacerdotum fedei contentio, 1.270) wins out, to
foreshadow the Christian victory in Book ii. The description of the battle
itself (2.253–463) is surprisingly matter-of-fact and devoid of epic excess
(cf. Luc. 3.509–762). Oddly, Actium is mentioned only for its geographical
proximity (478–80) not historical precedent. Instead praise is heaped upon

49
Wright 2009. For a selection of twenty-two Latin poems in a variety of metres see Wright, Spence
and Lemons 2014. This anthology does not include the Bellum Turcum.
50
Barsi 2008.
216 paul gwynne
those who fought, those who fell, and those who survived to triumph.
An apostrophe to the fallen gives the general flavour:
Felices animae, quibus est Fortuna peracta
Proque fide Christi posuistis corpora letho.
Gratulor et vivis, quod post certamina parto
Victores redeant Capitolia ad alta triumpho.
Gratulor et vobis, nullum maris aequor arandum
Quod maneat, sed parta quies in secula cuncta;
Praecipue quibus ad tam sancti vota parentis
Contigit in Coelum recto iam tramite tolli,
Non alia ex aliis moriendo in fata vorari.
(Leo, Bellum Turcum, 2.686 94)51

Happy Spirits, whose fortune is complete and who gave their life for their faith in
Christ. I also congratulate the living that return victorious to the lofty Capitol
from this struggle. And I congratulate you because there remains no sea to plough,
but eternal rest; and especially those whose destiny is to be raised directly to
heaven by the prayers of the Holy Father and not to be devoured in death, one
after the other.

The success at Lepanto instigated a revival of heroic epic, as there was

finally a Christian victory to celebrate. But martial poetry also redis-
covered its purpose in the religious wars that divided Europe. As both
Protestant and Catholic scholars promoted an epic theory concomitant
with their religious views, heroic poetry flourished. To pick some lesser-
known examples: Dermot O’Meara’s five-book Ormonius celebrates the
military career of Thomas Butler, 10th Earl of Ormond and his unwaver-
ing loyalty to the English crown;52 the Gunpowder Plot against James
I prompted a spate of anti-Catholic ‘gunpowder epics’ (including
200 hexameters by seventeen-year-old John Milton);53 while James
Philp’s unfinished Grameid chronicles the Jacobite rising of 1689 led by
John Graham, first Viscount Dundee.54 Huguenot–Catholic rivalry in
France elicited from Pierre Mambrun the twelve-book Constantinus sive
idolatria debellata (1658) which, as the subtitle suggests, took the over-
throw of idolatry as its sacred cause;55 in northern Europe Gustavus
Adolphus became the subject of four contemporary epics;56 and
Protestant–Catholic rivalry was also transposed to Brazil as the Dutch

51 52
Barsi 2008: 273–74. Edwards and Sidwell 2012.
53 54
For the gunpowder epics see Fletcher 1996; Haan 1992. Houghton 2012.
55 56
Maskell 1973. Helander 2004.
 Epic 217
challenge to Spanish hegemony in South America was celebrated in
Franciscus Plante’s twelve-book Mauritias (1647).57

Jesuit Epic
Jesuit poets seized upon the military virtues (courage, faithfulness,
obedience, endurance) in St Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises to formulate a
new heroism for the Ecclesia militans.58 Writing for Jesuit seminarians
about Jesuit heroes, epics proliferated, published in pocket-sized octavo
volumes often with indices for easy reference. Jesuit missions to the East
afforded ample opportunity to highlight heroic acts of courage. One
example, from many, must suffice. Quinque Martyres e Societate Iesu in
India libri sex (Venice: Muschius, 1591) by Francesco Benci, sj
(1542–94), is an elegant and dramatic account of the first Jesuit embassy,
led by Rodolfo Acquaviva (1550–83) to the court of the Mughal Emperor
Julāl-ud-Dīn Muhammad Akbar (1542–1605).59 The poem describes the
foundation of a new mission at Cuncolim in Salcete in summer 1583.
The premonitions of martyrdom, revealed to Rodolfo Acquaviva in a
prophetic dream in the opening book, are realized in Book v when the
local population attacks and destroys their work. Aeneas’ divinely
ordained journey to found Rome provides the obvious point of reference
and the poem is echoed at key points throughout the narrative. The
death of two catechumens, for example, recalls the fate of Nisus and
Euryalus (Aen. 9.176–449):
domnicvs alphonsvm confosso ut corpore vidit
Exhalantem animam, turbatus imagine mortis,
Incertus quid agat, fugiat ne, petat ne periclum,
Constitit exanimis, telumque instare tremiscit:
Tum faciem propior mortem ferrumque timenti,
Tentat nequicquam celeres extendere gressus,
Sed dolor, et gelida prohibet formidine sanguis.
Huc periture veni, cursuque et voce secutus
Miles ait, comitem ne desere: dicere versus
Vos soliti, alternis, iunctis aut vocibus ambo,
Ite ambo, laudesque deo persolvite vestro.
Dixerat, et tenerum latus inter et ilia ferrum
Condit, et alphonsi rapiens ad flebile corpus,
Alterum in alterius proiectum funere voluit.

57 58 59
Eekhout 1979. Gwynne 2016a. Benci 1591.
218 paul gwynne
Ille manus tendit, dulcem complexus amicum;
Et visus sensisse alter, blandeque recepit.
(Benci, Quinque Martyres, 5. 981 96)60
Domnico, as he sees Alfonso with a fatal wound and breathing his last, disturbed
by the sight of his death, is uncertain what to do, to run away or face the danger;
he stood motionless, and trembles as first the weapon, then the face press closer
upon him, terrified of the death and the sword. In vain he tries quickly to run
away, but grief and cold fear prevent him. ‘Come here and die’, the warrior says,
who pursued him in steps and words, ‘don’t desert your friend. You two, who are
always reciting your prayers, one after the other, or with joined voices, go
together, sing your praises to your god’. He spoke and sinks his sword between
his tender flanks and groin, and dragging his body to Alfonso’s pitiable corpse, he
rolled them across each other in death. Domnico stretches out his hands and
embraced his dear friend who seems to have felt his presence and sweetly
acknowledges him.
Horrific detail, pathos and suspense combine as each missionary meets his
gruesome end. The aristeia of these Jesuit heroes is the resolution with
which they face their enemy. Book vi is entirely devoted to their triumph-
ant reception by Christ, the Virgin Mary and St Ignatius among the
blessed. As Yasmin Haskell has observed, ‘Jesuit neo-Latin epic demands
a level of reader participation unparalleled in its primary literary model
(Virgil). The lives of the heroes portrayed in these poems are quite literally
exemplary.’61 The didactic nature of panegyric serves to inspire the Jesuit
novitiate to achieve equal acts of heroism.

Discovery and Conquest in the New World

Other themes also proliferated. The Odyssey, the stories of the Argo, and
Virgil’s Aeneid had consecrated travel as an epic theme, and from the
sixteenth to eighteenth centuries heroic narratives of colonial enterprise,
closely modelled on these epics of voyage, also began to appear. A number
of poems were written to commemorate Columbus’ expeditions to
the West Indies.62 One of the most popular was Giulio Cesare Stella’s
unfinished Columbeid, the English printing of which was dedicated to Sir
Walter Raleigh, then preoccupied with plans to colonize Virginia. Syphilis,
a three-book epic by Girolamo Fracastoro (c. 1478–1553) compares Colum-
bus’ Atlantic crossing with Aeneas’ mission to reach Italy.63 As the title
suggests, most of the poem is actually concerned with the origins of the

60 61 62
Benci 1591: 172–3; Society of Jesus 1654 1.1, 749. Haskell 2010: 206. Hofmann 1994.
63
Eatough 1984: 91–3.
 Epic 219
venereal disease and its possible cures. Now more influenced by Lucretian
atomism than Virgilian epic, Fracastoro theorized that the contagion was
born of seminaria (‘seeds of disease’) to explain its rapid transmission.
Given the repugnant subject matter, Fracastoro adduced the charming
myth of the shepherd Syphilus who is inflicted with the disease by the
vengeful gods of the classical pantheon. That this work gave syphilis
its modern name is all the more testament to the poem’s reception
and diffusion.
The new generation of travel epic dealt not only with voyages of
discovery, but also chronicled and lauded missions of conquest and con-
version. The perennial clash between Christian and Turk was now trans-
posed to the Americas where the native populations replaced the Muslims
as impious adversary. Conversely, as Andrew Laird has observed, the
‘fascination with Greek and Roman antiquity even prompted the conquis-
tadors to re-enact scenarios from ancient history books: Cortés, for
example, notoriously likened himself to Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar
and other figures.’64
As the colonies became established, indigenous poets too began to celebrate
their homelands, customs and religion in epic terms. Guadalupe by José
Antonio de Villerías y Roelas (1695–1728) is an epic in four books on the
special destiny of New Spain as dominion of the Virgin Mary, and manages to
incorporate Nahuatl words into the Latin hexameter. As Laird has observed,
‘the Guadalupe is a triumph of patriotic syncretism: Cortés is praised at the
same time as the courage of his indigenous adversaries is affirmed.’65
Like Columbus, Cortés continued to be the subject of epic poetry.
Francisco Xavier Alegre’s Alexandriad (Forlì, 1773), a four-book epic on the
capture of Tyre by Alexander the Great, is perhaps a historical allegory of
Cortés’ own seizure of Tenochtitlán. Even at this late date, Walter of
Châtillon still cast his long shadow over neo-Latin epic. One episode in the
Alexandriad recalls a passage of the Alexandreis, a dream-vision in which
a Rabbi tells Alexander to sack not Jerusalem but Tyre (Alexandreis,
1.511–45); in Alegre, the same Rabbi appears to Alexander and briefs him
on how to ensure the siege’s success.66
With Alegre we have come full circle. In an ‘Apologetic Essay’ that
precedes the epic he situates his Alexandriad within the entire tradition of
humanist epic poetry to date:

64 65
Laird 2006: 9. Laird 2006: 21.
66
The incident is borrowed from Josephus, AJ, 11.8.5, and repeated in Petrus Comestor, Pat. Lat.
198.1496.
220 paul gwynne
We certainly admit that there is an excessive, or to be honest, childlike
dependence on Virgil throughout this little work. Who though would not
see the same in all those who have, with some distinction, written since the
thirteenth century? For Francesco Petrarch’s Africa, Pontano’s Hesperides,
Darcio’s Hunting Dogs, Fracastoro’s Syphilis, Vida’s poem on the death of
Christ, Iacopo Sannazaro’s Virgin Birth, Rapin’s Gardens and very many
works by other writers smack of Virgil on every side. So? Is it not the case
that Virgil himself, for all that he is, has, as Lilio Giraldi said, emerged from
imitation of the best?67

F U R T H E R RE A D IN G
There is no book length history of neo Latin epic: though Kallendorf 2014a (on
epic) and Schaffenrath 2015 (on narrative poetry), in addition to this chapter, offer
starting points. Few poems are available in modern critical editions. Many
fifteenth century epics remain only in manuscript, often in the original deluxe
presentation volumes. IJsewijn and Sacré 1998 offer a general review of hexameter
poetry; while Hofmann 2001 surveys the epic tradition from the fifteenth to the
eighteenth centuries; Hofmann 1994 details five poems on Columbus’ voyages.
Lippincott 1989 discusses Basini’s Hesperis, Filelfo’s Sforziad and Strozzi’s Borsiad
in a review of fifteenth century Italian court culture. For a new edition of the
Sforziad see De Keyser 2016. A handlist of over eighty neo Latin epics composed
in France or on French themes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries can be
found in Braun 2007. A list of Biblical epic, Latin and vernacular, can be found in
Kirconnell 1973; see also Sayce 1955; Grant 1959; Lewalski 1966. Twenty two
poems on the Battle of Lepanto are now available with an English translation in
the I Tatti Renaissance Library (Wright, Spence and Lemons 2014). A selection of
Jesuit epic can be found in Society of Jesus 1654. Laird 2006 reviews the epic
tradition in the New World.

67
Laird 2006: 29. Those poems not mentioned above are: Giovanni Gioviano Pontano (1429–1503),
De hortis Hesperidum, two books on arboriculture; Giovanni Darcio da Venosa, Canes (1543), how
to select hunting dogs; René Rapin sj, Hortorum libri IV (Paris, 1665) on gardening. De poetis
nostrorum temporum (Florence 1551) by Lilio Gregorio Giraldi (1479–1552) mentions Virgil’s debt to
earlier authors. On the overlap between epic and didactic see Victoria Moul, Chapter 11 in this
volume.
 chapter 13

Drama
Nigel Grif f in

There is ample evidence from the Christian Middle Ages of entertain-

ments involving text, action, character and music. Documents mention
actors, most often in laws and court reports. Yet it is only towards the
close of the sixteenth century that theatre emerges as a dynamic central
feature of local and national cultural life. The plays performed in the
spaces adapted and later designed for the purpose drew on many sources,
reflecting contemporary concerns, perennial and passing, and appealing
to audiences both learned and illiterate. Among the threads woven
together by authors such as William Shakespeare in Elizabethan England
and Lope de Vega in the Spain of Philip II are several that were
centuries old.
Three such threads can be identified. Each would be worked with the
others to produce the tapestry. The least significant of the three is
Italian in origin and grew out of the Latin humanistic comedy (below),
though it was much coloured by popular elements. Its influence is felt
strongly in France. Like their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, actors
played at town festivals and fairs, but court bookings and aristocratic
patronage provided a welcome element of sustainability and protection
for itinerant acting companies and encouraged them to develop a
repertoire of more ambitious full-length plays alongside the customary
ephemera and shorter pieces staged for the general public. An actor’s life
remained a precarious one, as was that of the fledgling acting troupes
elsewhere in Europe, but the comic style they developed, the commedia
dell’arte, with its stock types drawn from folklore and traditions of
clowning, would, when exported to the rest of Europe, prove decisive
in the development of European comedy and opera. In London, Paris,
Vienna and Madrid royal patronage also played its part. Though its
plots, characters and attitudes were rooted in Roman comedy, the
commedia dell’arte and its descendants seldom included material in

221
222 nigel griffin
Latin save by way of traditional mockery of set figures, such as rickety
and pedantic Latin masters and music tutors.1

Early Biblical Drama

However, the other two sources that fed into mainstream vernacular drama
in Europe did inspire plays, for both recitation and performance, that were
in whole or part in Latin, the international language of the ruling elites
both ecclesiastical and secular. The first, going back to at least the tenth
century, originated inside the Church. Courtesy of the troping of key
elements of the Easter liturgy, the biblical story was transformed into short
dialogues in Latin initially sung, as at St Gallen, as antiphons between
priest and choir and then over time expanded to make them accessible and
memorable to a new public unversed in Latin. Episodes selected included
the betrayal of Christ (first by Judas and then by Simon Peter), Pontius
Pilate, the empty tomb, and, by the thirteenth century, the appearance of
the risen Christ first to Mary and subsequently to the disciples on the road
to Emmaus. The earliest known trope on the question asked of the three
Marys at the beginning of the Introit to the Mass for Easter Quem
quaeritis? (‘Whom do you seek?) – a scene sometimes known as the
Visitatio sepulchri (‘The Visit to the Tomb’) – comes from Limoges in
Central France and can be ascribed to the 920s. Ethelwold, Bishop of
Winchester, gives an account in his Regularis concordia of a similar devel-
opment in his own diocese around 970, citing the Benedictine houses of
Fleury (St-Benoît-sur-Loire) and Ghent (Dunstan’s Flanders refuge at
Blandijnberg) as furnishing the model.2 We now have evidence of more
than four hundred Easter celebrations before 1300 involving embryonic
dramatization, almost all of them in Latin.3 Many of those same key
episodes were depicted in painting and sculpture of the period.
Similar processes, often more folkloric in character, evolved at a slightly
later date around the celebration of the Christmas cycle, where subject
matter and representation were less problematic: the flight into Egypt, the
manger, the shepherds (Officium pastorum), the Wise Men, King Herod,
and the Slaughter of the Innocents. What began as a simple antiphon
structure grew in most local traditions into something more resembling
drama and involving not just text and song, but costume and character, as
witness, for example, the naming of the three Wise Men and the

1
See Shapiro 2005 and Andrews and Mamczarz 1998.
2
Though the so-called ‘Fleury playbook’ may be from Blois; see Corbin 1953. 3
Kolve 1996: 11–13.
 Drama 223
development of an individual personality for each. Examples survive from
Castile, Catalonia, France and the German-speaking lands of Central
Europe.4 Several early liturgical plays make reference to permanent sepul-
chres constructed at the Western end of churches and functioning as mini-
stages for Christmas manger sequences and Easter scenes involving the
empty tomb. Similar if ephemeral elements of modern Christmas worship
(manger, crib, shepherds, tableaux) are the distant heirs to that innovation.
By employing choir to develop dialogue and sung response, such ‘enact-
ments’ came to perform a function similar to the sculpture and wall
painting characterized by Sir Brian Young as the ‘villeins’ Bible’.5
The consequent increase in the duration of religious celebrations
afforded scope for characterization, while processional movement, both
within church and across a parish, came to play an increasing part in such
enactments. A generic example would be Wise Men from the East taking
one route to Bethlehem via the palace of Herod the Great (located in the
pulpit?) and then leaving the manger by another (perhaps the south door?)
to spread the good news and avoid divulging to the king the whereabouts
of the infant Jesus. The parallel development of miracle and mystery plays
on a far grander scale, retelling local legend in addition to biblical narrative,
drew upon this example, transferring the action away from Church prem-
ises and into the large public spaces of towns and cities, particularly
in northern Europe. The Officium pastorum, to take just one example,
developed into the shepherds’ plays in the English miracle cycles. (The
morality plays of the later Middle Ages are direct descendants but enjoyed
little vogue in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.) Such ‘serious’
entertainments, serving to create or reinforce the social identity of a parish,
a profession or an entire town, were often played in a mix of Latin and the
vernacular – albeit that the latter came to predominate, as outreach became
more important than scrupulous observance of textual nicety.6 In cathedral
schools and at the Imperial Court, meanwhile, the Latin repertoire grew to
embrace treatments of other biblical stories, Rebecca and Daniel promin-
ent among them.7

The Revival of Roman Drama

The final thread, and for our purposes the most important of the three, is
the revival in the Renaissance schoolroom and university aula of the Latin

4 5
Yonge 1967; Donovan 1958; Shergold 1967: 1–25. Young 1990.
6 7
Roston 1968; Rose 1961: 178–99. Axton 1974: 77–99.
224 nigel griffin
plays of Plautus and Terence. Roman drama, and Terence in particular,
had featured on the school curriculum from the earliest times, as witness
the large number of surviving texts and commentaries in manuscript and
incunable editions, although, in the early years, Seneca had been the focus
of most attention, with scholars in thirteenth-century Padua editing his
tragedies and others in the following century, both there and in Oxford,
writing commentaries on them. Twelfth- and thirteenth-century Goliards,
most of them unemployed university-trained clerics, made wide and
often scurrilous use in their performances not only of Ovid, Martial, and
Catullus, but also of the drama texts they had read as students. There was
little clear appreciation of the difference between closet drama and public
performance, nor any indication of Terence’s being staged, rather than
read, in the Middle Ages. Italian Renaissance courts, however, did host
performances and imitations of these Roman models, sometimes with
incidental music.
The earliest new Renaissance Latin play to survive is the Ecerinis of
the poet and historian Albertino Mussato (1261–1329). Though it takes as
its subject matter thirteenth-century North Italian history and eschews the
mythological elements we find in Seneca, it is closely modelled on him,
structurally and stylistically. Mussato’s immediate successors Antonio
Loschi (1368–1441), Leonardo Dati (1407–72) and Gregorio Correr
(1409–64) each depicted historical incidents not treated by Seneca but
produced plays that closely imitated his manner and style.8 After 1530, the
vogue for plays on more recent history seems to have receded until
the early seventeenth century, exceptions being Diogo de Teive’s 1553/4
Coimbra piece on the reign of John III of Portugal (published 1558);9
Thomas Legge’s 1578 Cambridge Richardus tertius, and two dramas staged
at the English college in Douai: William Drury’s Aluredus (1618?) and
Adriaen de Roulers’ (Roulerius’) Stuarta tragœdia (1593) on the execution
of Mary Queen of Scots six years earlier at Fotheringay.10
New tragedies not on recent history continued to be written in Latin
even though several were influenced by Greek models, most notably
the influential Sofonisba of Gian Giorgio Trissino (1478–1550): written
1514, printed 1524; and two plays, Jephthes and Baptistes, from the pen
of Montaigne’s sometime tutor, the Scot George Buchanan (1506–82).

8 9
Grund 2011. Frèches 1964: 101–8.
10
Bradner provides an account of a small number of later, seventeenth-century pieces that also treat of
contemporary historical events, among them Gustavus Adolphus’ 1620s Poland campaign and the
fall of Wallenstein in 1637 (Bradner 1957a).
 Drama 225
Though first printed in 1554 and 1577 respectively, these humanistic
exercises in harnessing classical structures and Aristotelian principles ‘to
promote new currents of religion and education’ were probably written in
the 1530s or 1540s, when the author taught at the Guyenne in Bordeaux.11
It was not until the 1390s that Roman comedy had resurfaced, and when
it did, in the Paulus of Pier Paolo Vergerio the Elder (1370–1444/5),
it emerged complete with scenes of student drinking, wenching and
exploitation by servants, a setting familiar to readers of Celestina (1499)
and her brood.12 The claim was made at the time that such pieces and
those that followed – the De falso hypocrito (‘On the False Hypocrite’) of
Mercurio Ranzio of Vercelli (1400–69), the Chrysis of the future Pope Pius
II (Enea Silvio Piccolomini, 1405–64), and the piece adjudged by Bradner
‘the best of these cynical comedies’, Philogenia et Epiphenus by Ugolino
Pisano (c. 1405–c. 1445) – had a serious moral lesson to impart.13 Yet the
length of the tavern and brothel scenes and the evident glee with which
they are written make such claims difficult to sustain and the plays read
more like student satires on university life than texts written by their
teachers for moral edification or public display. There is, indeed, a whole
tradition of plays in Latin, sometimes known as the Italian humanistic
comedy, written by students and recited or performed to mark the begin-
ning or end of the academic year.14
The first recorded modern performance of a Plautus play comes from
Rome (Asinaria at the Quirinale, 1480, the same venue seeing Aulularia
four years later), while the performance, before an audience of over ten
thousand, as part of the annual Ferrara carnival festivities, of Plautus’
Menaechmi in the Palazzo del Corte on 25 January 1486, in a version
perhaps made by Duke Ercole I himself, may have been the first presenta-
tion of a Roman comedy in translation anywhere in Europe. That same
play was staged on at least seven further occasions in Italy before the
fifteenth century was out (the 1488 Florence presentation being in Latin,
as was the Hampton Court Palace performance of 1526 arranged by
Cardinal Wolsey and attended in shepherd’s costume by an uninvited
Henry VIII). All thirty-two known stagings of Plautus (27) and Terence (5)
prior to 1500 took place in Italy, and the only Roman drama played
anywhere else was a single performance (1486) of an unidentified Seneca
play at the University of Leipzig. Italy continued after 1500 to see frequent

11
On dating and on Montaigne’s taking a part in Jephthes, see McFarlane 1981: 93–6, 190–4.
12 13
Rojas 2001: 47–55. Bradner 1957a: 33.
14
Ten sample texts are printed in Pandolfi and Artese 1965; study by Stäuble 1968.
226 nigel griffin
performances of Roman comedies in both Latin and in vernacular adapta-
tion (at Ferrara, Mantua, Venice and in the Campidoglio in Rome and the
Vatican) but by then it was not alone. Pieces by Plautus and Terence were
staged in studia at Augsburg (1500), Vienna, Wrocław, and Metz (all 1502),
Zwickau (1518), Leuven (1530), Prague (1535) and Coimbra (1554); by
Cambridge colleges (Queens’, Trinity College, Trinity Hall, King’s Hall:
1510, 1516, 1522, etc.); by pupils at St Paul’s School in London (1519, 1528);
and at Cardinal’s College Ipswich (1525).
The first imitations of classical comedy would appear to be the Stylpho of
Jakob Wimpheling (1450–1528), played at Heidelberg in 1470 and still being
staged thirty-five years later, and Codrus, a 1485 work by Johannes Kerckmei-
ster (c. 1450–c. 1500), a Münster schoolmaster. Both poke fun at students and
teachers incompetent in grammar. A play based on Aulularia and written by
the Leuven philosopher and friend of Erasmus Maarten van Dorp (Dorpius,
c. 1485–1525) was given as early as 1508–9 at Lille in the Pas-de-Calais, where he
was then a student, while another Leuven-trained teacher, Jean Sturm
(1507–89), included the study and performance of Roman comedy as part
of his recipe for mainstream education and arranged for a permanent stage to
be erected for this purpose in his Strasbourg studium. Sturm’s version of
Phormio was played there in 1565. The Munich Rathaus saw several such
stagings in the second half of the sixteenth century, as did towns as far apart as
Regensburg, Königsberg, Bergen, Copenhagen and Basel. Westminster
School in London entered the lists in the 1540s; Gray’s Inn in London and
Merton College Oxford, in the 1560s.15
Though there was also a separate strand associated with court life and
ceremonial occasions, most of these performances were at schools and
universities.16 The expansion of secondary and higher education in the
latter decades of the sixteenth century increased exponentially the number
of those familiar, directly and indirectly, with classical Latin drama. That
expansion in higher education coincided with the growing split in Christ-
endom between Rome and much of Europe, and was in part fuelled by it.
Latin school plays became an arena of sectarian propaganda as well as
religious debate and instruction. They also proved an effective way of
advertising the virtues of a particular studium and its pupils, and a powerful
tool for harnessing the energies of the young and rehearsing them in the
public speaking that was such a central feature of public and priestly life.

15
APGRD (http://www.apgrd.ox.ac.uk/) Oxford Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman
Drama.
16
For court performances, see Knight 1983: 117–40.
 Drama 227

The Christianizing of Roman Comedy

The popularity of Roman comedy in both Catholic southern Europe and
the growing Protestant cells to the north triggered various attempts to
produce bowdlerized and more specifically Christianized versions of them,
customarily but not always in Latin. As with the dramatization of elements
of Church ritual, the reading and staging of Roman comedy had its
opponents, who believed the subject matter and treatment too vulgar for
an aristocratic and clerical readership.17 Education, they argued, involved
not just Latin-language training (and Plautus they adjudged too archaic for
that purpose) but also schooling in good conduct. By the beginning of
the seventeenth century, some even opposed the reading and staging of
any literature making prominent use of classical mythology. Despite the
Terentian feel of the Filius prodigus [‘Prodigal Son’] (1593) of the Sicilian
Giovanni Antonio Viperano (1535–1610), with its reduced cast, one-day
action, and cat’s cradle of potential amorous relationships, most teachers
shied away from close imitation of Roman comedy plots. Prominent
among those who early opted to wipe the slate clean by writing new
dramas with a clear Christian message while retaining as much as they
might of the Terentian style, were Willem Gnaphaeus (1493–1568),
a schoolmaster in The Hague whose Acolastus, the first neo-Latin play to
recount the parable of the Prodigal Son, was played across Europe and
went through thirty-two editions in the sixteenth century alone, and
Georg Macropedius (born Joris van Lanckvelt in Brabant, 1487–1558), a
Utrecht headmaster who produced a dozen such plays for school use, most
but not all of them based on biblical stories. (It has been suggested that his
Andrisca may have influenced Shakespeare’s conception of The Taming of
the Shrew.) Macropedius’ plays, which also include a Prodigal Son treat-
ment (Asotus 1537) were performed in several European countries and,
indeed, both then and later there was much more international traffic in
play texts than has perhaps been generally recognized.18
Others penned dramas in the 1530s and 1540s on biblical subjects,
among them Sixt Birck (Sixtus Betulius, 1501–54: Susanna 1532, Judith
1532, etc.), Jacob Schöpper the Elder (d. 1554: Johannes decollatus vel
Ectrachelistes (‘John Beheaded, or Ectrachelistes’) 1546), the English poet
and imitator of Surrey Nicholas Grimald or Grimoald (1519–62:

17
Dréano 1936; Valentin 1990: 19–48.
18
On European productions of Macropedius, see Bloemendal 2009. On international exchanges of
plays more generally, see Griffin 1980, 2006.
228 nigel griffin
Archipropheta sive Johannes Baptista (‘The Archprophet, or John the Bap-
tist’) Oxford? 1547), and Buchanan. McFarlane suggests that pieces in the
Terentian idiom specifically tailored to a Reformist agenda enjoyed a
vogue in Strasbourg and Cologne around the year 1540: Pammachius
(1539) and Mercator (1540) by Thomas Kirchmeyer (Naogeorgus), Petrus
Papeus’ Comoedia de Samaritano evangelico (‘Comedy on the New Testa-
ment Samaritan’, 1539), the Anabion sive Lazarus redivivus (‘Anabion, or
the Raising of Lazarus’, 1540) of Joannes Sapidus, as well as Gnaphaeus’
Acolastus and the Ovis perdita (‘The Lost Sheep’) of Jakob Zovitius (also
1540).19 The 1570s and 1580s saw an astonishing variety of Latin dramas
from the pen of the polymath Nicodemus Frischlin (1547–90: Opera
scenica 1604), created laureate to Maximilian II in 1575 and Count Palatine
in 1577, but subsequently disgraced. The best-known collection of Chris-
tian plays written in imitation of the style of Terence remains, however,
that of the Haarlem schoolmaster Cornelis Shoen (Schonaeus, 1541–1611)
customarily known collectively as the Terentius christianus. Many of
the biblical episodes he selected for his plays proved popular with later
neo-Latin dramatists both Protestant and Catholic: Saul, Tobit, Susanna,
Daniel and so on.20
As the century wore on, voices in Puritan England and also on mainland
Europe were raised not only against the subject matter of Roman comedy
and the persistent use of classical mythology but rather against all forms of
drama. The rocky beginnings of the commercial theatre in both London
and Madrid cannot entirely be ascribed to political and financial factors.21
Well before the 1590s, amateurs of the playhouse were already under attack
from religious extremists, both Protestant and Catholic, who saw the
theatre as the handmaiden of the devil and a disquieting example to the
general citizenry. One who found himself having to fight his corner was
William Gager of Christ Church Oxford who, like Sir Philip Sidney,
compiled pamphlets defending the theatre. He also wrote two lengthy
and inordinately busy plays based on Greek tales, Meleager and Ulysses
redux (‘The Return of Ulysses’), both 1592.22 Schoolmasters found them-
selves faced by a dilemma. Roman comedy was not morally unimpeachable
and yet the parents of their schoolboy charges insisted that anyone who did
not know the Roman comedians could not style himself a scholar. Some,
instead of rewriting from scratch and attempting a ‘Christianized’ Latin
repertoire, tackled the far thornier task of bowdlerization. Most notable

19 20 21
McFarlane 1981: 194–5. Bloemendal and Ford 2008. Shapiro 2005; Shergold 1967.
22
See Binns 1970.
 Drama 229
among these are André des Freux (Frusius, c. 1510–56), the epigrammatist
and translator into Latin of the first version of Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual
Exercises who produced an expurgated version of Martial for schoolroom
use (1558) and another of Plautus, and his fellow Jesuit, Fulvio Cardulo
(1526–91), who produced in the early 1550s his own Terentius purgatus,
unpublished.23
Despite early performances of Latin dramas at Ferrara, Florence and
elsewhere, the fashion for comedy seems after 1500 in Italy to play out
increasingly in the vernacular, while the occasional new Latin tragedies
staged at the threshold of the early modern period include Carolus
Verardus’ Historia Baetica of 1492, treating the conquest of Granada,
which is, according to Bradner, ‘closer to the medieval mystery play in its
method than to classical drama’ and Marcellinus Verardus’ Fernandus
servatus (‘Ferdinand Delivered’, 1493).24 After 1505 there was seemingly
little new Latin non-religious comedy in Italy until the 1560s, although
later in the century there was for a while a vogue at Cambridge for
Latinizing as well as imitating recent Italian comic works, examples being
Abraham Fraunce’s Hymenaeus (1579) based on a story from Giovanni
Boccaccio’s Decameron, and the same author’s Victoria (1582), a Latin
version of Pasquaglio’s Il fedele with its ‘cynically immoral plot and
singularly repellent characters’.25 In Germany, meanwhile, the earliest
Latin plays – the Tragœdia de Turcis et Soldano (‘Tragedy of the Turks
and the Sultan’, 1495) of Maximilian I’s poeta laureatus Jakob Locher
(Philomusus, 1471–1528) and the Tragicomœdia de Iherosolomitana profec-
tione (1501) of Johannes von Kitscher (d. 1521) – both owe a clear debt to
Verardus, while Hermann Schotten’s pieces of the late 1520s already flirt
with issues raised by the Reformation.

Neo-Latin Drama and the Society of Jesus

By some measure the greatest factory of neo-Latin drama from the mid-
sixteenth century onward was the Society of Jesus, founded by Ignatius
Loyola in 1540 and from the mid 1550s the leading teaching order in the
Catholic world. Fifty years ago, when Bradner was compiling his checklist of
Latin Renaissance drama, it was popularly supposed that, the occasional
printed play text apart, little had survived of what was seen as a predominantly
ephemeral if influential form of school exercise. The picture is now markedly
different. Jesuit drama is one of the most active areas of neo-Latin research and
23 24 25
On these authors see Griffin 1995a. Bradner 1957a: 35. Bradner 1957a: 49.
230 nigel griffin
some five thousand manuscript texts have so far come to light, a number that
is still increasing. Many are partly or wholly in the vernacular but those
predominantly or entirely in Latin still constitute the greatest body of neo-
Latin dramatic material from the early modern period (researchers should
beware that a Latin play title mentioned in official despatches to Rome does
not necessarily mean that the play itself was in Latin).26 Bradner’s conclusion,
emerging from his survey of printed play texts, that the ‘three most consider-
able Jesuit dramatists’ were the Lisbon-born Luís da Cruz (Crucius,
1542–1604), ‘Johannes Surius’ (?) and Nicolas Caussin (1583–1651), is no longer
sustainable, and scholars have turned their attention to others, many of whose
plays have only recently appeared in print: Pedro Pablo de Acevedo (1522–73),
Miguel Venegas (1531–after 1589), Bernardino Stefonio (1560–1620), Jakob
Gretser (1562–1625), Jakob Bidermann (1577–1639) and others.27
Of the more than three thousand secondary works wholly or partly
devoted to Jesuit drama, over one-third have appeared since the 1960s.28
Much of the work on printed primary sources has now been surveyed in
some detail,29 and there is a better appreciation of the wide gulf between
the rules laid down at the Society’s Roman headquarters (limiting the
frequency of such junkets, insisting that they be wholly in Latin, and
attempting to legislate on which members of the general public might or
might not attend performances) and a practice that was more often than
not dictated by local factors, economic and political, beyond the control of
college authorities.30 In its early days at least, the Society was financially
stretched by a programme of explosive expansion and consequently vul-
nerable to the whim of its local patrons and paymasters. While many a
school play, both Protestant and Catholic, was in essence a private per-
formance staged for the benefit and pleasure of the boys themselves and
their parents (and the often huge cast list bears witness, as in a modern
primary school, to the pressure to ensure that as many of the pupils were
involved as possible), Jesuit plays, particularly in towns and cities where
religious conflict was alive and well, were highly public occasions, attended
by the great and good and involving much pomp and ceremony (and
frequently great expense). Evidence comes in a not atypical complaint sent
to Rome in 1568 from a member of staff at the Plasencia college in south-
west Spain:

26
On this see Valentin 1990: 63–74 and Griffin 1975: 409–10.
27
See Alonso Asenjo 1995, 2002; Picón García et al. 1997; Fumaroli 1975; Valentin 2001.
28 29
Griffin 1976 and subsequent publications; Wimmer 1983; Valentin 1983–4. Griffin 1995b.
30
Griffin 1984.
 Drama 231
I write to tell you that such festivities do more harm than good . . . Plays are
taken so seriously that 300 or 400 ducats are spent on costumes and
decor . . . The students taking part lose respect for the teachers, while the
sanctuary of our house is violated by a stream of outsiders . . . We are
pushed and pulled this way and that for a month beforehand and a week
after the event . . . We have to beg people in the confessional and around
the town to lend us costumes, headdresses, and jewellery . . . and they
murmur about our involvement in such things . . . The teachers are both
angry and ashamed that boys say that if they do not have such and such a
costume they will refuse to go on stage . . . And the leading lights in the city
(and others) pester us to reserve seats for them and even their wives.31

Despite such misgivings, the taste for grand display ruled supreme.
Our knowledge of Jesuit drama in more distant parts of the world which
were nominally Catholic and under European dominion (South and
Central America, southern India, the Far East) is comprehensive, even
though plays and dialogues were there customarily staged in a European
vernacular.32 The overall picture for Europe is, however, still patchy, with
much more now known about Jesuit theatre in German-speaking lands
than anywhere else, thanks largely to the industry and scholarship of one
man: the leading expert in the field, Jean-Marie Valentin of the University
of Paris. His two-volume Répertoire, in particular, provides a model others
would do well to emulate.33 In one respect, those working on German-
speaking lands have an advantage over their colleagues surveying other
parts of Europe, as play summaries were customarily printed in Central
and Eastern Europe for distribution to selected members of the audience.
There is a massive multi-volume edition of these assembled by Szarota and
also a smaller compilation from France.34 These Valentin has trawled,
alongside the college histories, still largely unpublished, commissioned at
the close of the sixteenth century by Jesuit headquarters in Rome.35 The
histories, compiled on the basis of the quarterly and annual reports
submitted to Rome and for the most part still in manuscript, have been
consulted by historians interested in other aspects of the Society (most
notably by Delattre for his monumental account of Jesuit buildings and
architecture in France) but, beyond the German-speaking lands and
Hungary, no such systematic work has been done for drama. The momen-
tum Valentin generated almost single-handedly has, however, inspired

31
Pedro Rodríguez to Francisco Borja, 30 June 1568 (Rome: Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu,
Hisp. 108, 285r); original in Griffin 1984: 25–7.
32 33
See Trenti Rocamora 1947; Martins 1975. Valentin 1983–4.
34 35
Szarota 1979–87; Desgraves 1986. On the histories, see Valentin 1983–4: xvii–xix.
232 nigel griffin
others to go some way towards following his example for a range of
European countries.36 The picture for France is perhaps the least satisfac-
tory of all the main European countries, possibly because of the existence
there of a strong and much-trawled contemporary vernacular drama trad-
ition and the vogue for court plays in French.
There is a growing sense that we should be slow to assume, in the
absence of any hard evidence, that the presence today of a manuscript in
a particular library or a particular city affords a reliable indication of
provenance or authorship.37 As time goes on, further international links
will appear and these may well change our perception of national dra-
matic difference. Meanwhile, we might close this rapid survey by citing
the example of two plays staged and restaged for local and sectarian
purposes. Euripus, sive de inanitate omnium rerum (‘Euripus, or the
Emptiness of Everything’) was written in 1548 by Lewin Brecht (Brechtus)
ofm of Antwerp (1502/3?–1560?) for performance at the College De Walk
in Leuven and first printed there in 1549; a German version of
1582 made by the Vicar of Augsburg Cathedral Cleophas Distelmayr was
printed that same year in Dillingen.38 The play’s clear warning, already
hinted at in the title, of the dangers of heresy that lie in wait for all men,
and its emphasis on the visualization of the various stages in a man’s
spiritual development, seemed to many of those charged with the moral
education of the young similar in inspiration and method to St Ignatius’
Spiritual Exercises, using spectacle and imagination to put flesh on the
bones of received wisdom. Miguel Venegas (1531–after 1589), a Spanish
Jesuit initially posted to Portugal but who toured much of Central Europe
in the 1550s and 1560s, producing occasional poetry and adapting his own
plays and those of others to suit local requirements, found himself involved
in several productions of the Brecht piece.39 Venegas’ own plays were
staged in Portugal, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, and are in several
cases found today bound in with copies of Euripus.40 Jesuit performances
of Euripus are now attested at Vienna and Cologne (both 1555), Prague
(1557, 1560, 1569), Ingolstadt (1559), Munich (1560), Innsbruck (1563),

36
Germany: Wimmer 1983 and Rädle 1979; Low Countries: Parente 1987 and Proot 2008; Spain:
Alonso Asenjo 1995 and, following him, Menéndez Peláez 1995 and Picón García 1997; Portugal:
Frèches 1964 and then Ramalho 1969 and his pupils; Italy: Filippi 2001; Greater Poland: Okoń 1970;
Greater Hungary: Pintér 1991 and Demeter 2000.
37 38
See Griffin 2006. Text in Rädle 1979; study by Valentin 1990.
39
On Venegas in general see Griffin 1984, 2006, and Alonso Asenjo 2002; on his involvement in
productions of Brecht see Valentin 1972.
40
Griffin 1971–2.
 Drama 233
Trier (1565), Dillingen and Córdoba (both 1566), Como (1568), Avignon
(1569) and Lyon (1576). Three further performances have been mooted,
though the evidence is less compelling: at Olomouc (Olmütz) in 1574,
Braniewo (Braunsberg) in 1585 and Graz (1592); there may well have
been others.
Plays by Venegas’ prize pupil, the Crucius alluded to earlier by Bradner
and the only Iberian-based sixteenth-century Jesuit to have his collected
plays printed in the early modern period – by Horace Cardon in Lyon,
the year after the author’s death – were earlier performed from manuscript
copies elsewhere in Catholic Europe. The most striking instance of
an adaptation for local purposes is the staging in Cologne early in the
seventeenth century of his Sedecias.41 Originally given in October 1570 at
the Coimbra college in the presence of the 16-year-old King Sebastian,
who eight years later was to perish along with the flower of the Portuguese
nobility at the battle of Ksar el-Kébir, it was now accorded a fresh
prologue and a number of textual changes that addressed specific local
issues.42 Many of those who watched it would have recalled only too
vividly the events of the so-called War of Cologne (1583–88) that saw
disaffected and unpaid Spanish troops from the Netherlands drafted in to
sack and loot the towns and villages supporting Lutheran factions in the
region. With its emphasis on the twin themes of rebellion and punish-
ment and its on-stage executions of rebels, it delivered an uncomprom-
ising reminder to any independently minded citizens of Cologne still
attracted by the prospect of an anti-Habsburg alliance that those who
flirt with rebellion against an absent (Habsburg) monarch and conspire
with the pro-Palatinate cabal against the true religion represented by the
Bavarian Elector will suffer the full Aeschylean horror of the fate that
befalls the central character of the play, Sedecias, and his entourage. Their
palaces and cities will be sacked and razed to the ground, as much of
Cologne had been in the 1580s, and as Jerusalem was in the sixth century
bce when the Babylonian hordes descended upon it; they themselves will
be summarily executed as were the anti-Yahwist counsellors who ignored
the warnings of Hieremias; and all that they hold dear will be destroyed
before their very eyes. They will be left amid the ruins of their cause and
their city, as is Sedecias in the play, ranting and raving in a blind fury while
the victorious monarch and his loyal henchmen jeer at their fall and their
impotence. Not all Latin school plays, then, were dull and wooden
exercises in humdrum moralizing.
41 42
Cruz (Crucius) 1605: 443–634. Griffin 1980.
234 nigel griffin
Valentin’s Répertoire chronicles the dominance in Central and Eastern
Europe of Jesuit drama, Latin and vernacular, right through to the dissol-
ution of the Society in the 1770s. Work on this later period is also
gathering pace. Particularly helpful publications include recent work on
Austria by Stefan Tilg and the splendidly illustrated account of the so-
called Sopron collection of stage designs by Knapp and Kilián.43

F U R T H E R RE A D IN G
Additional studies on neo Latin drama in the Spanish speaking world are available
through the website TeatrEsco: Antiguo teatro escolar hispánico, hosted by the
University of Valencia (parnaseo.uv.es/teatresco.htm); see in particular the
contributions of Julio Alonso Asenjo. The databases compiled by the team at
the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Neo Latin Studies (http://neolatin.lbg.ac.at/
research/neo latin tools) are valuable and growing. There are also helpful recent
essays in: Meier, Meyer and Spanily 2004; Pinto 2006; Piéjus 2007; Glei and
Seidel 2008; Meier, Ramakers and Beyer 2008; Meier and Kemper 2011;
Bloemendal and Norland 2013; and Ford and Taylor 2013.

43
Tilg 2002; Knapp and Kilián 1999.
 chapter 14

Approaching Neo-Latin Prose as Literature

Terence Tunberg

Our ideas about aesthetics, which still owe much to notions popularized in
what historians call the age of Romanticism, have perhaps not prepared us
well to understand and appreciate the learned artifice of neo-Latin prose.
One of the most fundamental elements of this artifice is imitation. The
grammarians and rhetoricians who propagated the new humanist curricu-
lum known as the studia humanitatis (‘Humanistic Studies’) in Italy during
the later fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, taking their lead from
Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch, 1304–74), developed a distinctive type of Latin
prose which much more obviously resembles the prose of ancient Roman
authors than do the Latin writings of other late medieval authors who were
separated from the culture of the humanists.1 This new prose resulted from
the widespread practice of systematic and studied imitation of the language
of the ancients, especially that of the pagan Roman prose authors.2
But among the humanists there were several distinctly different
approaches to imitation. A good starting point for understanding at least
two of the humanistic schools of thought about stylistic imitation may be
found in a famous epistolary debate between Paolo Cortesi (1465–1510) and
Angelo Poliziano (1454–94) concerning the most viable approach to writing
good Latin.3 Poliziano, borrowing Seneca’s image of a bee collecting honey

1
Medieval imitation seems more often than not to have been restricted to the simple borrowing
(especially from scripture) of words, phrases or passages, and rarely, if ever, to have involved the
complete absorption, reapplication, and adaptation of the vocabulary, idioms and typical sentence
structure of a specific author to a new context. On medieval Latin imitation, especially in the twelfth
century, see the excellent study by Martin 1982.
2
The thoroughness of humanist imitation is well explained and illustrated by Moss 2003. In addition
to pagan authors, some Church Fathers, such as Lactantius and Jerome, were objects of imitation,
and a few neo-Latin works, such as the orations of Longolius or Muret, or the colloquia of Vives and
Erasmus were themselves considered worthy of imitation. On the ‘transitional’ features, retaining
some medieval syntactical elements, in Petrarch and other early humanists see: Bausi 1996; Rizzo
1988, 1992–3 and 2002: 29–73; Tunberg 1991, 2004.
3
This correspondence was printed many times in the Renaissance and early modern era. For a modern
edition see DellaNeva 2007.

237
238 terence tunberg
from many different flowers,4 argued that the best style for his contempor-
aries must be eclectic: the neo-Latin writer should combine diction derived
from a range of ancient authors to create a texture that would be entirely
composed of ancient Roman Latinity as far as its elements were concerned,
but would also be new from the perspective of the whole creation and the
combination of those elements. The eclectics, therefore, proposed a range
of models, namely the auctores probati [‘approved authors’] and did not
attribute primary authority to any single author.5

Poliziano, Valla, Erasmus and Eclectic Style

A major factor in the wide dissemination of the eclectic point of view was the
immense popularity of a book written by Lorenzo Valla (1407–57), which was
entitled Elegantiarum linguae Latinae libri sex (‘Six Books about Accurate,
Correct Usage in Latin’). The Elegantiae (which is the commonly used short
form of the work’s title) might fairly be described as an encyclopedia of Latin
prose usage. It became a standard reference work for writers of Latin prose
throughout the humanist age and the early modern period.6 In Valla’s Elegan-
tiae primary authority as far as language is concerned is given to the Roman
prose authors whose literary careers fell in the period of approximately two
centuries bounded by the lifetimes of Cicero and Quintilian. From the works of
these authors come Valla’s copious examples of correct usage for Latin prose.7
But no eclectic neo-Latin prose author had more influence on European
letters than Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536). Although he was an accom-
plished composer of verse, Erasmus achieved special distinction in prose:
his letters, declamations (especially Laus stultitiae (‘Praise of Folly’) and
Querela pacis (‘Complaint of Peace’)), treatises on moral philosophy,
eloquence and educational theory, and even some of his theological works
have won admirers through the centuries not merely for their content, but
also for their style. In his famous and satiric Ciceronianus, a dialogue
devoted (in large part) to the question of literary imitation, Erasmus
persuasively argued that eclecticism was the most practical approach for

4
Sen. Epist. 84. 1–10.
5
Eclecticism was indeed highly congenial to the habits of learned readers in the Renaissance, who were
trained to note striking or beautiful phrases in ‘commonplace books’, see Moss 1996.
6
The circulation of the Elegantiae both in manuscript and in print has been the object of several
studies. See IJsewijn and Tournoy 1969 and 1971; Regoliosi 1993. In some editions the Elegantiae was
equipped with notes and indices. It was also abridged, and imitated by others, such as the much
shorter Elegantiolae of Agostino Dati (1420–78).
7
For an excellent treatment of Valla’s choice of models, see Casacci 1926.
 Approaching Neo-Latin Prose as Literature 239
writers of neo-Latin, and Erasmus’ own literary output accords well with
his theoretical views about style and imitation.8
Before we consider the eclecticism of Erasmus’ own prose style,9 it will
be worthwhile to appreciate the fact that Erasmus, perhaps even to a
greater degree than Valla had done a century earlier, contributed an
eclectic flavor to the entire tradition of neo-Latin prose writing. He did
so partly by publishing treatises designed to be aids for composition, such
as Paraphrasis in Vallae Elegantias (‘Paraphrase of Valla’s Elegantiae’), an
epitome of Valla’s work, and De duplici copia uerborum ac rerum (‘On the
Twofold Abundance of Words and Subjects’), a systematically arranged
thesaurus of phrases relating to many different topics. But Erasmus’ special
legacy to future neo-Latin eloquence was his Adagia, an immense collec-
tion of memorable expressions and proverbs derived from the entire range
of ancient Latin literature (including many sayings excerpted from Greek
authors), each of which Erasmus elucidated with his own commentary.10
This work, which Erasmus expanded and republished several times in his
career, was probably the most widely distributed thesaurus of proverbial
wisdom published in the entire Renaissance and early-modern period.
Countless writers repeated, adapted and committed to memory phrases
from the Adagia, and its influence upon eclectic expression was enormous.
In fact, Erasmus, like many humanists, wrote in several different styles,
including simple commentary or exposition, a polished conversational
style represented in his Colloquia familiaria (‘Dialogues in the Familiar
Style’) and a rhetorically elaborate form of address manifest in some of his
prefatory epistles. But Erasmus’ skill in Latin prose (and his eclecticism) is
perhaps best observed in his declamatory style, which he chose as the
medium for his most biting satires, and most serious observations on social
and moral problems. Let us consider this example from the Laus stultitiae.11
The speaker is Folly herself, an allegorical figure:
Sed quid si doceo me huius quoque tanti boni et puppim esse et proram?12
Docebo autem non crocodilitis aut soritis, ceratinis aut aliis id genus
dialecticorum argutiis, sed pingui, quod aiunt, Minerua13 rem digito

8
On the Ciceronianus in the context of Erasmus’ eclecticism, see Tunberg 2011.
9
For a general consideration of Erasmus’ prose language (together with a large bibliography), see
Tunberg 2004.
10
The Erasmian commentaries added to each adagium vary greatly in length. Some of them, such as
Erasmus’ essay on the phrase Dulce bellum inexpertis [‘War is sweet to those who haven’t tried it’],
circulated as separate treatises.
11
Erasmus 1979: 92, lines 382–96. 12
‘Prora et puppis’, Adag. 8; LB ii, 28E.
13
‘Crassa Minerua: pingui Minerua: crassiore Musa’, Adag., 37; LB ii, 42A.
240 terence tunberg
propemodum ostendam. Age, conniuere,14 labi, caecutire, hallucinari in
amicorum vitiis, quaedam etiam insignia vitia pro virtutibus amare mirari
que, annon stulticiae videtur affine? Quid cum alius exosculatur naeuum in
amica, alium delectat polypus Agnae,15 cum filium strabonem apellat petum
pater,16 quid, inquam, hoc est nisi mera stulticia? Clament terque quaterque
stulticiam esse: atqui haec una stulticia et iungit, iunctos et seruat amicos.17
De mortalibus loquor, quorum nemo sine vitiis nascitur, optimus ille est
qui minimis vrgetur:18 cum interim inter sapientes istos deos aut omnino
non coalescit amicitia aut tetrica quaedam et insuauis intercedit, nec ea nisi
cum paucissimis (nam cum nullis dicere religio est) propterea quod maxima
pars hominum desipit, imo nullus est, qui non multis modis deliret, et non
nisi inter similes19 cohaeret necessitudo.

But what if I argue that I am the ‘stern and the prow’ (i.e. beginning and
end) of such a great boon? But I’ll show this not though crocodilitis or soritis
or ceratinis (these are names of types of arguments employed by dialect
icians) or other logicians’ hair splittings of this sort, but rather I shall point
it out virtually with my own finger <and> with ‘dull Minerva’ (i.e. plain,
simple language), as they say. Come now, to wink at <a fault>, to make a
mistaken judgment, to turn a bind eye, to indulge in delusion in the case of
friends’ faults, to love and admire even some remarkable faults in the place
of virtues doesn’t this seem akin to folly? What <is to be said>, when one
fondly kisses the wart in his girlfriend, when another is delighted with
Agna’s polyp, when a father calls his squinting son ‘fluttery eyed’ what is
this, I insist, except pure folly? Let people shout thrice, four times this is
‘Folly!’ but this folly alone brings friends together, and preserves their
friendship when they have been brought together. I’m speaking about
mortal men: none of them is born without faults: the best is the one who
is impaired by the fewest faults while on the other hand among those god
like wise men either no friendship arises at all, or <there arises among
them> a sort of severe and forbidding type of friendship, and that too only
with a very few people (I scarcely dare say with no people!), because the
great majority of people are foolish; I should rather say there is no one
who is not in many respects besotted! And fellowship only develops among
like minded people.

14
‘Conniuere’, Adag., 750; LB ii, 317C.
15
Hor. Serm. i, 3, 40 (turpia decipiunt caecum vitia aut etiam ipsa haec / delectant, veluti Balbinum
polypus Hagnae . . .).
16
Ibid., 44–5 (siquod sit vitium non fastidire. Strabonem / appellat paetum pater . . .).
17
Ibid., 54 (haec res et iungit iunctos et servat amicos . . . ). Erasmus’ words here clearly echo the
Horatian verse, but the same thought is also explained and illustrated in Adag., 1853 (‘Obsequium
amicos, veritas odium parat’, LB ii, 675A).
18
Ibid., 68–9 (nam vitiis nemo sine nascitur; optimus ille est, / qui minimis urgetur . . .).
19
‘Simile gaudet simili, & Semper similem ducit Deus ad similem’, Adag., 121 & 122; LB ii, 79E–80B.
 Approaching Neo-Latin Prose as Literature 241
This passage like so many others in Erasmus’ works, and especially in his
declamations, abounds with adagia (indicated above with italic letters).20
We should also note how many Erasmian sentences echo Horatian verses
(whose works he is said to have learned by heart) – though Erasmus,
of course, is writing in prose.21 Erasmus draws on the entire ancient
patrimony of Latin for his vocabulary and he is noticeably fond of
non-Ciceronian words and phrases. In the passage quoted above, for
example, we note id genus meaning eius generis. This adverbial accusative –
constantly used by Erasmus and quite a few other humanists – is an
archaism, which appears nowhere in Cicero except for two instances in
his correspondence (and one of these instances occurs in a letter written to
Cicero, not by him): it appears once in the Historia naturalis (‘Natural
History’) of Plinius (‘the elder’), once in Suetonius, and then comes into
fashion with the archaizing authors of the later second century ce, namely
Gellius, Apuleius and Fronto. A few other words in this passage of Laus
stultitiae reflect Erasmus’ eclectic taste: caecutio is found twice in the
remnants of Varro’s Satires, otherwise it occurs in Apuleius, in late Latin
and in Christian authors; coalesco is not rare in Sallust and Livy, but is
non-Ciceronian; taetricus is read in Livy, the poets, and in Silver Latin, and
is also non-Ciceronian.
At one or two points in our excerpt from Laus stultitiae we notice
elements of what might be described as rhetorical parataxis. This mode
of expression, which certainly enhances the immediacy and vividness of
Folly’s diatribe, is pervasive in Erasmus’ declamations: it may indeed be
considered one of the hallmarks of his declamatory style. Such parataxis is
created by the use of direct address in the second person, rhetorical
questions, imperatives, hortatory verbs and juxtaposition of antithetical
thoughts as equivalents to subordination.22 These rhetorical devices are
explicit, while the subordinating conjunctions are implicit. For a clearer
example of this mode of address, we may consider the following passage
from Erasmus’ Querela pacis,23 another declamation delivered by an alle-
gorical female figure, in this case Peace instead of Folly.

20
Erasmus manifests a special predilection for striking and memorable phrases in general. This
propensity leads him to produce sentences which occasionally resemble the pointed phrases of
Seneca.
21
On the wide range of authors considered by Erasmus to be authoritative, see Chomarat 1981: i,
399–406.
22
A similar kind of discourse is quite often apparent in Seneca’s philosophical essays and letters, and it
even appears occasionally in Cicero’s orations, when Cicero wishes to excite the emotions of his
hearers, or highlight the irony of a situation.
23
Erasmus 1977: 96, lines 842–50.
242 terence tunberg
Roma furiosa quondam illa bellatrix tamen Iani sui templum aliquoties vidit
clausum.24 Et quî conuenit apud vos nullas esse bellandi ferias? Quonam ore
praedicabitis eis Christum pacis autorem ipsi perpetuis dissidiis inter vos
tumultuantes? Iam quos, putatis, animos addit Turcis vestra discordia? Nihil
enim facilius quam vincere dissidentes. Vultis illis esse formidabiles? Concordes
estote. Cur vltro vobis et praesentis vitae iucunditatem inuidetis et a futura
felicitate vultis excidere? Multis malis per se obnoxia est vita mortalium,
magnam molestiae partem adimet concordia, dum mutuis officiis alius alium
aut consolatur aut iuuat . . .
That state of Rome, even though she was raging and warlike in times of old,
neverthless several times saw the temple of her Janus closed. And how is it
appropriate that among you <Christian Europeans> there is no respite
from warfare? With what effrontery do you proclaim to them (i.e. other
peoples) Christ the initiator of peace, though you yourselves due to con
stant dissensions are battling among yourselves? Do you have any idea how
much your discord increases the boldness of the Turks? For nothing is
easier than conquering people at odds with each other. Do you wish to be
fearsome to them (i.e. the Turks)? Get along with each other! Why do you
of your own accord both begrudge yourselves a favorable condition of life in
the present, and set out to disqualify yourselves from future happiness? The
life of mortal men is in itself subject to many evils: but concord, in the
process of which people through mutual good services either console or
help each other, will remove a large part of the adversity . . .
The texture of most of this passage might be explained as follows:
Roma furiosa quondam illa bellatrix tamen Iani sui templum aliquoties
vidit clausum. Et quî conuenit apud vos nullas esse bellandi ferias? Here the
force is equivalent to a conditional sentence – si Roma furiosa . . . illa
bellatrix . . . Iani sui templum aliquoties vidit clausum, quı̂ conuenit apud vos
nullas esse bellandi ferias?
Quonam ore praedicabitis eis Christum pacis autorem ipsi perpetuis dissidiis
inter vos tumultuantes? This is actually a concessive sentence – Quonam
ore praedicabitis eis Christum pacis autorem, quamvis/cum ipsi perpetuis
dissidiis inter vos tumultuemini?
Iam quos putatis animos addit Turcis vestra discordia? Nihil enim facilius
quam vincere dissidentes. Here is the equivalent of a causal sentence – Iam
quos, putatis, animos addit Turcis vestra discordia, cum nihil . . . sit facilius

24
The gates of the temple of Janus, situated in the Roman forum, were closed when the Roman
people was nowhere at war. In all the centuries from the legendary founding of the city (753 bce) to
the battle of Actium (31 bce) the gates of the temple of Janus were said to have been closed only
three times.
 Approaching Neo-Latin Prose as Literature 243
quam vincere dissidentes. (Note also the paratactical use of putatis as a
parenthetical verb.)
Vultis illis esse formidabiles? Concordes estote. Here is another conditional
sentence – si vultis illis esse formidabiles, concordes estote.
Multis malis per se obnoxia est vita mortalium, magnam molestiae partem
adimet concordia, dum mutuis officiis alius alium aut consolatur aut iuuat.
This is implicitly a concessive sentence – quamquam multis malis per se
obnoxia est vita mortalium, magnam tamen molestiae partem adimet con-
cordia, dum mutuis officiis alius alium aut consolatur aut iuuat.
Erasmus, therefore, adopts elements of style (including structure,
phrases and vocabulary) from many different sources and he combines
them into a rich texture of expression which is quite distinctive and very
much his own. Although we sometimes find elliptical sentences in Eras-
mus’ letters and commentaries, his style is not distinguished by brevity.
Indeed, in many of his works, including the declamationes, he is often
inclined to copiousness. But the endless variety of his constructions, his
immense vocabulary, his fondness for diminutives, create a lively and fluid
discourse, which often seems to involve the reader in conversation.
It is clear that eclecticism, as exemplified by Poliziano’s comparison (by
way of Seneca) of the composer of neo-Latin with the bee making honey,
continued to be a viable approach to writing neo-Latin prose long after
the time of Erasmus. Indeed it has undoubtedly persisted as long as neo-
Latin itself. At present, however, our ability to demonstrate the Nachleben
of Erasmian eclecticism is somewhat limited because of the paucity of
scholarly studies which not merely survey the precepts of grammarians,
rhetoricians or other theorists, but also offer an analysis, conducted from
a philological and stylistic perspective, of the actual Latinity of works
written in the later sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (and
even beyond).25

Muret, Bembo and Ciceronianism

But not all neo-Latin writers were eclectics – many considered themselves
to be Ciceronians. Their point of view was well represented by Paolo

25
A valuable step in this direction may be found in the work by Benner and Tengström 1977. Their
exploratory study of Latin texts produced in Sweden in the seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries suggests that an eclecticism which favored a range of auctores probati for imitation,
similar to the range of authors proposed by Valla in his Elegantiae (with a few Christian authors
added), was perhaps the prevailing stylistic approach adopted by Nordic writers of neo-Latin in that
period.
244 terence tunberg
Cortesi in his famous correspondence with Poliziano. Cortesi not only
rejected the eclecticism defended by Poliziano, he argued that since
antiquity there had been more or less universal agreement that Cicero
was the supreme master of Latin eloquence: Cortesi’s contemporaries,
therefore, who sought to express themselves in Latin, should imitate the
language of the best author, namely Cicero.26
Since the early Renaissance, Cicero had been proposed by many,
including such famous humanists as Leonardo Bruni (Leonardus Aretinus,
1370–1444) and Poggio Bracciolini (Poggius Florentinus, 1380–1459), as the
primary model for Latin prose.27 This idolization of Cicero the orator
accorded very well with the intellectual environment of the Italian city-
states in the early Renaissance, in which Cicero was upheld as a supreme
ancient model of the man of affairs, who combined knowledge gained
from letters and philosophy with civic eloquence and political experience.28
But a primary factor in the rise of Ciceronianism in the Renaissance was
that Roman authors of the first two centuries ce, especially Quintilian and
Tacitus, looked back on the age of Cicero as the high point of Latin
eloquence and, with remarkable unanimity, considered Cicero to have
been the greatest orator in Latin. Much more attention was given by the
humanists than by their medieval predecessors to these post-Augustan
Roman works (some of which indeed had hardly circulated in the Middle
Ages). It was from such works that the humanists gained not only their
understanding of the history of ancient Latin literature but also their
judgments about its greatest authors.
Ciceronianism gained many adherents in fifteenth century Italy. One of
its greatest exponents, Pietro Bembo (Bembus, 1470–1547), an influential
author in both Italian and Latin, won a position as Latin writer in the curia
of Pope Leo X. From that time on, the Ciceronian style became the
accepted idiom for papal letters. Bembo, and those who followed him,
such as the famous Belgian orator Christophorus Longolius (1488–1522),
cultivated a prose style which was more or less patterned on the periodic
style of many of Cicero’s speeches and was distinctive for its vocabulary
derived as exclusively as possible from the works of Cicero.29 These

26
DellaNeva 2007: 8–10.
27
Perhaps the best account of the earlier phases of the Ciceronian debate is still the one by Sabbadini
1885.
28
See Baron 1966.
29
Longolius migrated to Italy and won such fame for his Ciceronian Latin that he was admired as an
orator even by Italians (who, in this period, still tended to regard the transalpini as their inferiors in
eloquence). Longolius is widely considered to have been the inspiration for Erasmus’ absurd
 Approaching Neo-Latin Prose as Literature 245
enthusiasts for Ciceronian eloquence developed handbooks of Ciceronian
words and phrases as aids for composition, such as the often reprinted and
expanded Cicero lexicon originally composed by Marius Nizzolius
(1498–1576).30 Latin lexicography and the textual criticism of Roman
authors were still in their infancy in the early sixteenth century, and quite
a few words were then thought to be Ciceronian which have since disap-
peared from the critical editions of Cicero’s works. So we should judge the
vocabulary of early sixteenth-century Ciceronians with caution (and
inspect an old edition of Nizzolius’ lexicon when doubt arises). Some of
these Ciceronians, however, habitually wrote periodic sentences replete
with Ciceronian phrases and words, which do indeed call to mind Cicero’s
speeches,31 and this was true of Longolius in particular, even if he did not
always perfectly imitate Ciceronian syntax.
We should keep in mind too that even Cortesi, whose position on the
choice of Cicero as the exclusive model for Latin eloquence was quite
uncompromising, acknowledged that Ciceronian imitation should not
merely involve recreating a stylistic copy of Cicero’s language.32 Moreover,
by the middle and later sixteenth century many Ciceronians were taking a
less rigid approach to imitation of their favorite author than some of their
predecessors had done. This more flexible attitude to Ciceronianism was
adopted by teachers not only in Italy, but especially north of the Alps,
where it was advocated by leading German humanists, such as Philip
Melanchthon (1497–1560) and Ioannes Sturmius (1507–89). These mod-
erate Ciceronians favored Cicero as the primary model for neo-Latin
prose, but not the exclusive one. After all, argued Julius Caesar Scaliger
(1484–1558) in his defence of Ciceronianism against Erasmus, Cicero had
never restricted himself to a single model as far as vocabulary was
concerned.33 Indeed Cicero had not written about technical subjects,
such as agriculture and architecture: so it was especially in the case of

fictional character Nosoponus, who defends the Ciceronian position in Erasmus’ dialogue
Ciceronianus. For a detailed study of Longolius’ Latinity, with references to the usage of Bembo
and some other Ciceronians, see Tunberg 1997.
30
The tendency of extreme Ciceronians to rely on such word lists is ridiculed by Erasmus, and even by
some later Ciceronians, such as Marc-Antoine Muret: see Tunberg 1997: 49–51.
31
But we should also keep in mind that the style of Cicero’s letters and philosophical dialogues can be
quite different from the orations, and that Cicero’s style, so far from being uniformly ample and
periodic, is actually quite varied. For an important study which emphasises the many different facets
of Cicero’s style, see von Albrecht 2003.
32
Similem volo, mi Politiane, non ut simiam hominis, sed ut filium parentis. (‘I want <the writer> to
resemble <the master>, not like an ape resembles a man, but like a son resembles a parent.’) See
DellaNeva 2007: 8.
33
Scaliger 1999: 117.
246 terence tunberg
vocabulary that Ciceronians came to accept the validity of a variety of
models to supplement Cicero, who would, of course, constantly remain
the principal paradigm.34
A very important proponent of moderate Ciceronianism was Marc-
Antoine Muret (1526–82), a French humanist who spent much of his later
life in Rome, where he was employed both as a professor of eloquence and
as a public orator.35 The beauty of Muretus’ pellucid and impeccably
structured Latin has won admiration through the centuries from his own
time to the present. While the syntax of Muretus’ prose adheres extremely
closely to the classical norms of Cicero and Caesar, Muretus was quite
willing, under the appropriate circumstances, to employ non-Ciceronian
vocabulary and even the occasional phrase from post-classical or Christian
sources: but he typically did so with discretion and discernment.36 The
following passage comes from Muretus’ Pro Francisco II. Galliarum rege ad
Pium IV. pont. max. oratio v habita Romae postridie kal. Mai. Anno mdlx
(‘Fifth Oration on Behalf of Francis II, King of France to Pius IV,
Supreme Pontiff, Delivered at Rome on the Day after the Kalends of
May in the Year 1560’), one of several orations by Muret which might be
classified as diplomatic rather than academic.37
Nam si divinae litterae a quolibet Episcopo tantam integritatem ac virtutis
perfectionem exigi volunt, nullus ut in omni eius vita reprehensioni pateat
locus, neque gravitatem eius muneris digne a quoquam sustineri posse
tradunt, nisi quem pietas, prudentia, iustitia, uno verbo virtus suis omnibus
numeris absoluta commendet, quid in eo qui omni tempore cum summo
imperio tractare gubernacula Ecclesiae debeat, cuius vita ceteris omnibus
pro exemplo, voluntas pro lege, vox pro oraculo futura sit, quanto haec
omnia requiri maiora et divinitati propiora censemus? Itaque, ut alia, sic hoc
quoque sancte ac sapienter institutum est a maioribus, ut, quoties de
summo Pontifice in demortui locum eligendo ageretur, interea, dum ea
de re amplissimus Cardinalium ordo deliberaret, nullus intermitteretur dies,
quo non omnes et privatim et publice precarentur a Deo, ut eum ipse gregi
suo praeficeret, quem dignissimum, quem ad publicam concordiam et
tranquillitatem aut constituendam aut conservandam aptissimum, quem
denique, quantum humana conditio fert, sui simillimum iudicaret. Quod si

34
According to Melanchthon, Pliny’s Natural History is ‘a treasure trove of Latin, because, if Pliny had
not left us so many words for things, we would not be able to speak in Latin about many essential
aspects of our society’. See Bretschneider 1844: 186–7.
35
On Muret’s literary career, see now Girot 2012.
36
On the language and style of Muret’s prose, see Tunberg 2001. For a thoughtful assessment of
Muret’s Ciceronianism and classicism, see Fumaroli 1980.
37
Frotscher 1834: i, 149. Many of Muret’s orations deal with literary or philosophical topics and
pertain to the academic rather than diplomatic environment.
 Approaching Neo-Latin Prose as Literature 247
eiusmodi Pontificem ulla unquam tempora desiderarunt, nostrorum certe is
status est, ut nunquam magis ex istius Sedis auctoritate universi orbis salus
pependisse videatur. Non enim Petri navis, ut solebat, placido mari, secun
dis conspirantium ventorum flatibus impulsa fertur. Horribiles eam procel
lae et turbinum vis, vel exercitatissimis metuenda rectoribus, agitat, ut,
quanquam a naufragio quidem nullum periculum est, non mediocris tamen
animos teneat metus, ne tam saeva tempestas multos mortales, novarum
opinionum fluctibus involutos, in ea brevia praecipites abripiat, unde postea
nec enatare ipsi nec evadere atque emergere alieno auxilio possint.
For if the <opinion of> sacred letters is in favor of such blamelessness and
perfection of virtue being required from any bishop, that no place in his
entire life be open for rebuke, and <sacred literature> teaches that the
weight of that office cannot be worthily undertaken by anyone, unless he is
distinguished by holiness, good judgment, justice and, in a word, virtue
complete in all its parts, what <shall we say> of him who must at all times
manage the helm of the Church with highest authority, whose life shall
stand for all others as an example, his will as law, his words as prophetic
on how much higher a level do we judge that all these qualities are needed
<in him> and more nearly approaching divine status? And so, just as they
did in other respects, so also our forefathers piously and wisely brought it
about that, whenever the business of electing a supreme pontiff to take the
place of one just deceased was in process, while the illustrious college of
cardinals was deliberating on the issue, that everyone both privately and in
public would let no day go by without praying to God to place the person at
the head of His flock, whom He judged to be most worthy, most suitable
for establishing or preserving general concord and peace, and indeed most
like to Himself in so far as is possible in a human being. But if any age has
ever required such a pontiff, the conditions of our times are certainly such,
that the salvation of the world seems never to have depended more on the
authority of that Holy See. For the vessel of St Peter (i.e. the whole Roman
Church) is not, as it used to be, travelling on a calm sea, propelled by
favourable gusts of winds blowing together. It is being tossed by terrible
tempests and the force of whirlwinds, which even the most seasoned
captains must fear, so that, although there is no danger of total destruction,
the hearts <of those loyal to the Church> fear to no small extent, that
many people, caught by waves of seditious ideas, may be hurled headlong
by such a savage storm into those reefs from which they can neither
afterwards swim away by themselves, nor escape and flee with outside help.

The reader will not only admire the general Ciceronian quality of this
passage but also its carefully balanced symmetry. Amplification, parallel
and correlative construction, often reinforced by congruence of sound, is
judiciously employed to serve emphasis or to highlight central concepts.
We should note vita . . . pro exemplo, voluntas pro lege, vox pro oraculo . . .
248 terence tunberg
We observe that sancte ac sapienter are effectively placed early in the long
period which begins with Itaque and ends with iudicaret, and we notice
how, as a climax to the same period, the anaphora in three successive
clauses quem . . . quem . . . quem denique . . . emphasizes eum (the right
choice for supreme pontiff) placed earlier and right after the ut which
begins the climax. Moreover, symmetrical pairs of parallel words (com-
bined here too with congruence of sound) are constantly employed to
amplify both the meaning and the harmony of clauses and sentences: for
example et privatim et publice, or aut constituendam aut conservandam, or
nec enatare . . . nec evadere.
When speaking of the governance of the universal Roman Church,
Muret refers to summo imperio in a way which will easily call to mind
Cicero speaking of the Roman republic, yet Muretus refrains from the
constant use of pagan terminology to express Christian institutions, a habit
which is pervasive in the works of earlier Ciceronians such as Longolius or
Bembo, and which is lampooned by Erasmus in his Ciceronianus.38 So
Muret writes gubernacula Ecclesiae rather than gubernacula rei publicae
christianae, and amplissimus cardinalium ordo rather than patres conscripti.
In so doing Muret shows himself in accord with the Erasmian (and
Ciceronian) notion of decorum, namely that word choice should reflect
and be appropriate to the intended context.39
When Muret speaks metaphorically, he does so with care, and in a way
that seems to be consistent with the sensibility of Cicero, although he
never confines himself in a strict sense to only those transferred expressions
which are found in Cicero. The use of navis for res publica or civitas is of
course not foreign to Cicero, and Muret’s phrase Petri navis (not new with
Muret) to refer to the universal Roman Church accords well with Cicero-
nian expression. The image of the ship of state (or universal Church) being
borne on a tranquil sea by conspirantium ventorum flatibus fits the meta-
phor beautifully and appropriately, though in fact the verb conspirare
applied to the action of winds is only attested in post-Ciceronian authors.
The noun fluctus is also sometimes employed by Cicero with a transferred
meaning to refer to war, disease, civil disturbances and the like, so Muret’s
use of the word to refer to the minds of men disturbed and engulfed by
new doctrines accords with Ciceronian usage, even if it may be a slight
extension of it.40

38
Tunberg 1997: 44.
39
This is one of the central arguments in Erasmus’ Ciceronianus, see Tunberg 2011.
40
In other respects also Muret is not always a strict Ciceronian. For further detail see Tunberg 2001.
 Approaching Neo-Latin Prose as Literature 249
Finally we note that four of the five complete sentences in this passage
end with metrical (i.e. quantitative) clausulae (i.e. sentence endings),
which are among those favored by Cicero in his orations:
propiōră cēnsēmŭs (cretic and trochee)
simillimum iūdĭcārĕt (double trochee)
pependīssĕ vĭdĕātŭr (resolved cretic and trochee: the famous esse videatur)
impūlsă fērtŭr (double trochee)
Although our passage from the Orationes of Muret is too small to con-
stitute a statistically significant sample, our impression that Muret had
some understanding of Ciceronian prose rhythm and deliberately sought
to apply it in his own compositions is supported by the results of recent
research.41
The use of quantitative prose rhythm by humanist Latin authors,
however, is something which will require much more investigation, and
from future studies directed at this phenomenon we might learn quite a bit
about the development of humanism. By the later Middle Ages (i.e. after
about 1150) a kind of prose rhythm commonly called cursus, which con-
sisted of a series of simple and well-defined rhythms for the ends of
sentences and clauses, was regularly employed in certain types of prose,
especially in letters and manifestos produced by the papal curia and other
chanceries, both ecclesiastical and secular. This medieval cursus, which
actually had its origins in the elevated prose styles of late antiquity, was
based upon the accent of words, and not on the quantities of syllables.42
But in the fifteenth century, and concomitant with the rise of humanism,
it became typical for humanists to be employed as official letter-writers for
kings, city-states, nobles and prelates, and in the papal court itself. These
humanist chancellors and secretaries tended, it seems, to avoid the medi-
eval accentual cursus.43 Moreover, as the philological science of the human-
ists developed, grammarians gradually increased their understanding of the
fact that Cicero (and other Roman orators active before the end of the

41
For an exhaustive study, devoted to both the orationes and epistulae of Muret, in which carefully
chosen statistical tests have been applied, see Krause 2009. Krause’s thesis includes a survey of recent
scholarship, and an extensive bibliographical index of other recent studies devoted to prose rhythm
in humanistic Latin.
42
On the development of the medieval cursus, see Janson 1975. Janson offers statistical analysis of the
practice of many authors. For a discussion of later medieval practice, with illustrative examples, see
Tunberg 1996.
43
Our impression that the accentual cursus gradually became less pervasive in public letters written
from the mid fifteenth century onward is supported by at least one statistical study, see Lindholm
1963. Nevertheless, this development was obviously not always consistent – on traces of the medieval
cursus in the prose of Leonardo Bruni, for example, see Venier 2011: 60–73.
250 terence tunberg
second century ce) had employed a prose rhythm based on quantitative
metres.44 How commonly therefore, we might ask, did humanistic authors
of Latin prose not merely avoid medieval accentual rhythm, but actually
attempt in their own works, and especially in orations, to compose
sentences which ended in quantitative cadences similar to those favored
by Cicero? We will need many more studies grounded in well-accepted
statistical methodologies in order to gain even a tentative notion as to how
widespread this practice might have been.
Let us return to Muret and moderate Ciceronianism. As we have
mentioned above, Muret’s style was greatly esteemed for centuries, and
this was probably the primary reason why his letters and speeches were so
often reprinted. Among his admirers were prominent figures in the early
history of the Jesuit order, such as the rhetorician Famiano Strada.45
We should note the fact, for example, that Jacobus Pontanus
(1542–1626), a Jesuit teacher born in Bohemia, whose school dialogues
entitled Progymnasmata latinitatis (‘Exercises in Latinity’) were printed in
many parts of Europe, repeats Muret’s justification of moderate Cicer-
onianism almost word for word.46 Indeed, it would not be much of an
exaggeration to say that moderate Ciceronianism became the official
stylistic teaching of the Jesuit order, if we accept the statements of the
Ratio studiorum as authoritative.47 A testimony to the wide acceptance of
moderate Ciceronianism in early modern Europe is the fact that the
norms endorsed in most modern basic textbooks of Latin prose compos-
ition are still more or less Ciceronian.

Lipsius and Anti-Ciceronianism

Nevertheless, neo-Latin authors who seem to have deliberately eschewed
Ciceronianism and classicism were not lacking both in the Renaissance and
in the early modern era. Many of these were not merely eclectics: they made a
point of seeking rare or archaic words from early Latin authors such as Plautus

44
By the second half of the sixteenth century, at least, some grammarians were able to describe the full
range of Cicero’s clausulae with reasonable accuracy, as does Strebaeus 1582.
45
For Muret’s influence on his contemporaries and especially on Jesuit rhetoricians see IJsewijn 1995.
Frotscher, in the prefatory material to his edition of Muret’s Opera, offers an ample collection of
testimonia, which reflect the enduring esteem for Muret as a stylist. See Frotscher 1834.
46
For a comparison of the statements of Muret and Pontano pertaining to style and imitation, see
Tunberg 2011: 275–6.
47
The Ratio studiorum offers this precept: ‘although the most approved historians and poets are drawn
upon <for appropriate words/phrases>, writing style must for the most part be taken from Cicero
alone’. See Lukács 1986: 424.
 Approaching Neo-Latin Prose as Literature 251
or from archaizing authors of the second century ce, like Apuleius.48 They
also admired Lucretius, who, although he had been a contemporary of
Cicero, had cultivated a style and diction reminiscent of much earlier Latin.
Two pioneers of this ‘anti-Ciceronian’ neo-Latin prose were Filippo Bero-
aldo the Elder (1453–1505), who was the author of an important commentary
on Apuleius, and Ioannes Baptista Pius (c. 1475–c. 1542), who turned not
only to archaic or archaizing writers as a source for striking words and
phrases, but also to early medieval authors such as Sidonius Apollinaris.
Prominent among the neo-Latin authors whose style might (from the
perspective of Ciceronians and many eclectics) be regarded as ‘anti-classical’
was the Belgian philosopher, historian and philologist Justus Lipsius
(1547–1606), who, like Erasmus decades earlier, or like Muret slightly earlier,
had epistolary contacts with litterati all over Europe. Lipsius’ brevitas and love
for highly elliptical forms of expression became famous.49 One may gain a
preliminary impression of Lipsius’ elliptical diction (which is one of several
habits of expression contributing to brevitas) from the following passage.50
Adiungis de veteri tuo in me affectu. Scio et ab illo audivi, qui utrumque
nostrum amat . . . Is mihi de te aliquid, et literas etiam a te ostendit, in
quibus amor in nos descriptus. Si iamtunc habuisti, nunc magis cum sum
ubi boni51 me esse voluerint; utinam ipse bonus. Rogas me distincte aliquid
de Sibillis. Nunc aegre possum, cum abeunt isti vestri . . . quibus has dare
destinabam. Tamen praeter ea quae citas, arbitror te Onufrium vidisse in
libello singulari de Sibillis.52
From the context of the letter the reader can more or less supply what
Lipsius implies, but has not explicitly expressed. If we were to rewrite this
passage with a fuller and more conventional mode of expression, it might
read as follows.
Adiungis <quaedam> de veteri tuo in me affectu, <quem> scio et ab illo
audivi, qui utrumque nostrum amat . . . Is mihi de te aliquid <dixit>, et
literas etiam a te <missas> ostendit, in quibus amor in nos <est>
descriptus, <quem> si iamtunc habuisti, nunc magis <habebis> cum

48
For an excellent treatment of the rise of archaizing neo-Latin see D’Amico 1984.
49
See Deneire 2012 for a thorough analysis of Lipsius’ style.
50
The passage comes from a letter of Lipsius to Heribert Rosweyden dated 28 April 1593, which has
been edited by De Landtsheer 1994: 163. I owe thanks to Dr De Landtsheer for answering (in
correspondence) my questions about the circumstances which occasioned this letter and about the
reception of Lipsius’ style.
51
In this context boni refers to Roman Catholics.
52
Lipsius here refers to a work about the Sibyls originally published a few decades earlier. See the note
on this passage in De Landtsheer 1994: 163.
252 terence tunberg
sum ubi boni me esse voluerint, <qui> utinam ipse <sim> bonus. Rogas
me distincte aliquid de Sibillis. Nunc aegre possum <respondere>, cum
abeunt isti vestri . . . quibus has <litteras> dare destinabam. Tamen praeter
ea quae citas . . ..
You add some words about your long standing affection for me. I’m aware
of it and I’ve heard about it from the one who esteems each of us . . . He
told me something about you and he also showed me a letter you sent, in
which your fondness of me was expressed. If you already had this fondness
for me then, now you’ll have more of it (i.e. more occasion for it) while
I am where the right thinking people want me to be and I hope I myself
may be numbered among the right thinking people. You ask me something
specifically about the Sibyls. I can scarcely reply now, when your fellows are
leaving . . . to whom I was planning to give this letter. However in addition
to the things you mention [. . .]

The last clause (arbitror te Onufrium vidisse in libello singulari de Sibillis) is

so compressed as to distort normal Latin construction. Its meaning might
be represented thus: arbitror te vidisse ea quae Onufrius in libello singulari de
Sibillis scripsit (‘I think you have seen what Onufrius wrote in his remark-
able little book about the Sibyls’).
Ellipsis, as exemplified in the excerpt above, is of course merely one
feature of the Lipsian style. Distinctive also in his expression are a tendency
to avoid parallel construction (sometimes called inconcinnitas), different
types of wordplay, a proclivity for words which are rare or archaic in
Roman literature, and, on occasion, a sentence structure which sometimes
strains the conventions of Latin syntax. Plautus, Tacitus and Seneca have
been named as authors who inspired Lipsius’ style: but the actual texture of
Lipsius’ language is unique and sui generis.53 An adequate appreciation
of its complexity could only be gained by considering a much wider range
of examples than we can supply here.

General Observations
As we might expect, a large amount of neo-Latin prose falls somewhere in
between the major stylistic tendencies we have outlined above. Historians,
for example, were usually semi-eclectic with a bias towards Caesar or Livy,
although a few preferred to imitate Sallust or Tacitus, and even Florus.54

53
Critical views on Lipsius’ style and earlier attempts to analyze it are outlined by Deneire 2012.
54
See, for example, the detailed syntactical and stylistic study of Sepulveda’s De orbe novo (‘On the
New World’) by Rivero García 1993. On the different ancient models for neo-Latin history writing
see IJsewijn and Sacré 1998: 180.
 Approaching Neo-Latin Prose as Literature 253
Certain habits, moreover, especially pertaining to vocabulary, appear
to have been quite generalized among a wide range of neo-Latin prose
authors belonging to a variety of stylistic schools. Many of these authors
liked to use the terminology of the pagan political and religious world to
denote Christian concepts or institutions. In the orations of Longolius, for
example, we find the phrase sacris liquoribus delibutos (‘anointed with
sacred waters’) as a substitute for baptizatos (‘baptized’) and duodecim illis
Christi legatis (‘the twelve ambassadors of Christ’) instead of apostolis
(‘the apostles’), to mention just two of many similar appropriations of
ancient Roman political and religious phrases.55 But we should not think
this habit was entirely restricted to Ciceronian neo-Latin writers. Phrases
like Deus optimus maximus (‘God greatest and best’) modeled on Iuppiter
optimus maximus are common throughout neo-Latin.56 Even Erasmus,
although he ridicules the paganizing terminology of the Ciceronians in
his dialogue Ciceronianus, nevertheless sometimes employs such phrases as
sterilitati dicatarum virginum choro (‘band of virgins devoted to celibacy’)
which means approximately the same as ordini monacharum (‘order of
nuns’).57 But, while Longolius (whose practice represents that of extreme
Ciceronians) appears quite reluctant to use the vocabulary of Christian
Latin at all – even in a Christian context, Erasmus freely uses the vocabu-
lary of Christian Latin interchangeably with paganizing phrases. The use of
both kinds of diction contributes, of course, to variety of expression and
represents copia verborum, and we may conjecture that paganizing phrases
are sometimes deployed by Erasmus to add rhetorical colour to certain
passages. In any case, Erasmus’ practice in this regard is shared by a great
many other writers of neo-Latin prose. So, for example, in the writings of
the Jesuit historian Giovanni Pietro Maffei (Petrus Maffeius, 1533–1603)
baptized people are sometimes designated by phrases such as coelesti lavacro
expiati (‘purified by the heavenly bath’), and sometimes simply baptizati.58
In fact quite a few medieval Latin words continued in use among neo-
Latin writers, especially when it was necessary to discuss academic or
military affairs, for which much of the requisite Latin vocabulary had
evolved (sometimes from vernacular sources) during the medieval period.59
Neo-Latin authors commonly call attention to post-antique words or
expressions by adding explanatory phrases, such as quod vulgo dicitur . . .

55
For a list of these expressions, which includes the ones cited above and their sources, see Tunberg
1997: 44.
56
Helander 2004: 76.
57 58
In Encomium matrimonii [Praise of marriage], Erasmus 1975: 386, line 16. Maffeius 1751: 6, 9.
59
For Erasmus’ use of medieval Latin academic vocabulary, Tunberg 2004: 165–6.
254 terence tunberg
(‘which is commonly called . . .’). The same sort of explanatory phrase may
also denote a word directly quoted from a vernacular language, or a
vernacular phrase translated by the author into Latin.60 It is worth noting
also that many neo-Latin authors make a point of transmitting important
terminology from foreign languages, especially those of American or
Asiatic cultures.61 Neologisms also, of course, are not lacking in neo-
Latin, especially in scientific works. Such words are typically formed either
from Latin roots, or (following classical and Ciceronian precedent) from
ancient Greek.62
We conclude, therefore, by observing that neo-Latin prose (and neo-
Latin in general) is the continuation of a tradition of expression in Latin
extending without a break from antiquity itself, a tradition which had
persisted long after the language had ceased to be the vernacular speech of
any race or group of people. Continuities with the preceding medieval
phase of Latinity are sometimes apparent in neo-Latin prose, most notably
in vocabulary. But the rise of neo-Latin also represents, in large part, a
turning away from medieval trends and a reaffirmation of the classical
Roman sources of Latinity. Yet this very reaffirmation was the source of a
creative tension within neo-Latin, most especially with respect to the
evolution of different approaches to imitation. Neo-Latin is a complex,
multicultural and interdisciplinary phenomenon. Its firm roots in its
ancient heritage and its linguistic stability, which was maintained while
it was constantly being adapted to new circumstances, are to be counted
among its special qualities.

F U R T H E R RE A D IN G
On Latin prose style in general, see Von Albrecht 2003, Norden 1898 and Von
Nägelsbach 1905. On neo Latin prose style see D’Amico 1984, Tunberg 2014.
For information on the language of the earliest humanists see Rizzo 2002. For
Ciceronianism see DellaNeva 2007, Tunberg 1997 and Sabbadini 1885. For the
style of Lipsius and its influence see Deneire 2012. A fundamental starting point
for the study of neo Latin vocabulary is offered by Helander 2004. For prose
rhythm in the late Middle Ages and early humanistic era see Lindholm 1963.

60
The meaning and use of such phrases as quod vulgo dicitur is discussed by Tournoy and Tunberg
1996: 161–6.
61
For example, the Spanish historian and theologian Ioannes Ginesius Sepulveda (1490–1573), when
describing the habits of the Caribes in his De orbe novo, mentions their boats carved out of single
tree trunks, and adds ‘canoae’ patrio vocabulo nominantur (‘<These boats> are called ‘canoes’ in the
native language <of the people>). Ramírez de Verger 1993: 51.
62
For some good examples of Greek and Latin neologisms, see IJsewijn and Sacré 1998: 388–90. Many
more are found in the lexicon of neo-Latin prose by Hoven 2006.
 chapter 15

Epistolary Writing
Jacqueline Glomski

Introduction
During the Renaissance, the growing legal and political systems that
accompanied the rise of the city republics and the gestation of early-
modern states came to require a multiplicity of new forms of corres-
pondence and documentation. Influenced by their exposure to the
humanist educational programme, chancellors of the courts of princes
and secretaries in the offices of city governments put classical literature
to the service of the state and improved the script, vocabulary and style
of official letters and documents that had previously been bound to the
traditions of the medieval ars dictaminis.1 Although their state letters are
valuable documents for the political thought of the time, their non-
utilitarian (i.e. non-business) correspondence reflected their daily lives
and their opinions on a wide variety of topics; for reconstructing their
thought, these letters are no less important than any of their other
writings. The elegant style in which these non-utilitarian letters were
written, however, qualifies them as literature. Indeed, the humanists
considered their correspondence to be literature, for they collected their
own letters and those of others, and edited them for publication. They
composed letters they had no intention of sending, to augment or even
form a collection.2 Although from the mid sixteenth century the ver-
nacular came to be used widely in correspondence, Latin continued to
be used into the seventeenth century by humanists of international
stature and generally in international settings.3

The author wishes to thank Elizabeth McCutcheon and Jan Papy for their advice during the
preparation of this chapter.
1
Kristeller 1988: 123–4; Kristeller 1990: 8–9; Boutcher 2002: 139–42; Henderson 2002: 29.
2
Kristeller 1988: 124; Henderson 1993: 143, 155–6; Burton 2007: 89.
3
Clough 1976: 33–4; Nellen 1993: 88–9; Waquet 1993: 101.

255
256 jacqueline glomski
Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch, 1304–74) was the first to apply classical
models to the art of non-utilitarian letter-writing.4 In the prefatory letter to
his Rerum familiarium libri (‘Letters on Familiar Matters’) (January 1350)
he outlined his scheme for the ‘personal’ letter based on classical prece-
dents: a familiar and spontaneous text, a connection between family
members and friends, a written substitute for oral communication com-
posed in a seemingly careless style.5 But Petrarch also stressed the flexibility
of this type of letter, which he saw as a matter of decorum: letters could be
addressed to individuals of various ranks, their subject matter could
encompass either public or private affairs of interest to the addressee,
and they could reflect the distinct states of mind of the sender.6
In general, the letter was seen as the reflection of the soul because it was
to be written in a plain, character-revealing style and because it substituted
for the presence of an absent friend.7 The notion of friendship was
intimately connected to the art of letter-writing, and Renaissance writers
thereby revived a notion that had been important in antiquity, but that
had weakened in the Middle Ages. However, the foundation of letters in
friendship was merely abstract; the practical, rhetorical character of letter-
writing, as Petrarch had emphasized, demanded a decorum whereby style
was adjusted to suit the addressee.8 So, humanist writers came to use the
term familiaris for almost any kind of non-utilitarian letter-writing and did
not distinguish sharply between what we would now consider private and
public correspondence. In fact, in the Renaissance, the notions of ‘public’
and ‘private’ were inseparable so that although the private (i.e. non-
utilitarian) letters of the humanists could address nearly any type of subject
matter, they did not contain personal confession or self-analysis. Their
private letters seem to us to have a public nature.9
In the late fifteenth century, humanists began to follow Petrarch’s
example in collecting and publishing their own letters, which they were
able to do en masse with the development of printing.10 In his

4
For details on the recovery of the letters of Cicero and Pliny the Younger, and the rhetorical works of
Cicero and Quintilian, see Reynolds 1983: 316–22; Monfasani 1988: 178; Reynolds and Wilson 1991:
131, 135–9.
5
For the text of this letter and notes, see Petrarch 2002–05: 1.17–35, 243–51. The English translation is
found in Petrarch 1975: 3–14.
6
Rerum familiarium 1.1.28–9, 33 (Petrarch 2002–05: 1.27, 29–31). See Martín Baños 2005: 269–73.
7
Henderson 1993: 153–4.
8
Kristeller 1988: 124; Henderson 2002: 22; Martín Baños 2005: 499–502.
9
Henderson 1993: 146–9, 158; Henderson 2002: 29.
10
Although perhaps more directly influential were the printings at Venice of the letter collections of
Leonardo Bruni (1472) and Francesco Filelfo (before 6 Oct 1473). See Clough 1976: 39–42 and istc.
bl.uk.
 Epistolary Writing 257
introduction to his Rerum familiarium libri, Petrarch had described the
process of revising his letters for the collection.11 He had noted how he had
eliminated repeated expressions, cut out passages that he thought would be
boring to a reader, but left pieces of personal news and gossip where he
considered them enjoyable. These remarks reveal that, from the beginning,
the compilation and publication of a collection of one’s letters was an
exercise in self-fashioning. The example of Desiderius Erasmus, who
significantly revised his letter to Francis Cranevelt of December 1520 for
publication in August 1521 – not only through stylistic changes but
through the addition of a whole range of patristic references in order to
demonstrate his authority in his conflict with the theologians of Louvain –
and so changed a letter to a friend into a printed apologia, illustrates to
what extent a writer would transform an original, sent letter into one for
publication.12 Further, humanist authors could rearrange letters chrono-
logically or select only a few. In order to complete his self-portrait, the
letter writer might even include letters that he had written but had never
sent (and had probably never had any intention of sending) or letters
addressed to fictitious or historical persons.13 The author of a letter collection
was careful to form an image of himself that he wished current readers and
posterity to see. The ‘mirror of the soul’ was more a matter of self-
presentation than self-revelation; it was, in a certain sense, ‘a fictionalization
of one’s own personality’.14
Such letter collections, as well as letter collections of the ancients,15 were
used, too, as instructional models, complemented by handbooks on epis-
tolography. The first handbooks to be inspired by the recovery of classical
letter forms were composed in the second half of the fifteenth century;
these were mainly compendia of phrases, motifs and topics, linked to the
teaching of grammar, and offered as examples of good style. Letter-writing
was also discussed in the context of rhetoric, that is, in relation to the
traditional divisions of the oration (salutatio, exordium/captatio benevolen-
tiae, narratio, petitio, conclusio) (‘greeting, introduction/winning of good
will, statement of facts, request, conclusion’), which reflected the notion
that the purpose of the letter was persuasion.16 The blurred boundary

11 12
Rerum familiarium 1.1.31 (Petrarch 2002–05: 1.29). IJsewijn and Sacré 1998: 218–19.
13
Clough 1976: 35; IJsewijn and Sacré 1998: 218; Henderson 2002: 18. See also Gualdo Rosa 1980–81
and IJsewijn 1985.
14
Henderson 1993: 155; Henderson 2002: 22–4.
15
For details on the early printing of letter collections of the classical authors, see Clough 1976: 43–4,
54–8.
16
See also Chapter 16, ‘Oratory and Declamation’.
258 jacqueline glomski
between oratio and epistola was inherited from medieval times; therefore, in
some respects, the letter-writing manuals of the late fifteenth and early
sixteenth centuries continued the tradition of the ars dictaminis, even
though these texts sprang from dissatisfaction with medieval teaching.17
The handbooks written by the renowned scholars Erasmus, Vives and
Lipsius sketched out the continuing tension between support for the
familiar or for the rhetorical letter. The dominant epistolary treatise of
the sixteenth century, Opus de conscribendis epistolis (‘On the Writing of
Letters’) (1522) of Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536), accepted the epistle as
distinct from the oration and argued that the structure of a letter need not
correspond to the fixed elements of an oration.18 Indeed, Erasmus’ treatise
admitted the importance of the familiar letter and upheld the stylistic
multiplicity of the genre, defining the letter, like Petrarch, not by its form
or style but by its audience.19 Nevertheless, Erasmus considered the letter
an exercise in persuasion and appealed to rhetorical formulae as a guide for
understanding it. Juan Luis Vives, in his De conscribendis epistolis (‘On the
Writing of Letters’) (1534), likewise emphasized the diversity of the epis-
tolary form, its distinction from oratory, and the accommodation of style
to the subject and addressee.20 His opposition to the rhetorical concept
of the letter was, however, more robust: drawing on classical definitions,
he insisted on the distinction between the letter and other genres; he
cited the division made by Cicero between the familiar letter and the
serious letter, and he made a plea for a natural, less oratorical style.21 Justus
Lipsius followed in Vives’ wake in his Epistolica institutio (‘Principles of
Letter-Writing’) (1591),22 not just by differentiating the letter from the
oration and separating it from rhetorical classifications, but also by
demanding a simple style, insisting on liberation from strict imitation,
and by advocating an introspective form of correspondence based on the
writing of Seneca.23
Since these handbooks discussed the appropriate style for the letter and
appropriate models for imitation, they had to consider whether or not
Cicero should serve as the sole model for imitation in prose writing, a

17
Henderson 1983a: 337; Henderson 1993: 150; Martín Baños 2005: 256, 260–3; Burton 2007: 89–92.
18
For the Latin text established by Jean-Claude Margolin, see Erasmus 1971. The English translation
by Charles Fantazzi is printed in Erasmus 1985. For details on the influence of Erasmus’ treatise, see
Henderson 2007.
19
Henderson 1993: 150; Henderson 2002: 33; Martín Baños 2005: 333–42, 345–7.
20
For the Latin text and English translation by Charles Fantazzi, see Vives 1989.
21
Fantazzi in Vives 1989: 14–15; Fantazzi 2002: 49–50, 54; Martín Baños 2005: 361, 415–16.
22
For the Latin text and English translation by R.V. Young and M.T. Hester, see Lipsius 1996.
23
Young and Hester in Lipsius 1996: xxii, xxix–xliv; Henderson 2002: 37; Martín Baños 2005: 444–5.
 Epistolary Writing 259
controversy that had erupted in the 1480s in a correspondence between
Paolo Cortesi and Angelo Poliziano and that had simmered through the
sixteenth century. Erasmus confronted the question in his Opus de con-
scribendis epistolis, which criticized extreme classicism and presented an
array of classical, patristic and contemporary models, whereas Vives, in his
De conscribendis epistolis, recommended Seneca as an equal model to
Cicero. Lipsius put an end to the debate in his Epistolica institutio, which
called for a writer to free himself from the limitations of an excessively rigid
imitation and advocated the search for a personal style through an eclectic
imitation of the ancients.24

Literary Letters
The main issues discussed in the Renaissance handbooks of epistolography
feature significantly in the non-utilitarian letters of neo-Latin writers. The
defining trait of the neo-Latin literary letter was that of latinitas, a concern
for purity and correctness in the writing of Latin, which was to be
accompanied by claritas, brevitas, suavitas and decorum.25 Latinitas relates
directly to imitation, especially the question of the strict imitation of
Cicero. The tension between the familiar and rhetorical letter was resolved
with a growing emphasis on the appearance of spontaneity, as after 1575 the
Erasmian rhetoricizing tendency began to subside, and the familiar, brief
composition as represented by Lipsius and his generation gained favour.26
Finally, the motif of the letter as ‘the mirror of the soul’, a topos which
neo-Latin experts on epistolography inherited from classical authorities
(especially Demetrius, On Style),27 was also associated with a preference
for a plain style.
Petrarch’s ideal of the familiar letter – one that would make absent
friends present – is exemplified in Ep. Fam. 13.8, written in the summer of
1352, while Petrarch was living near Avignon, and addressed to his friend
Francesco Nelli, the prior of the church of the Holy Apostles at Florence.
In it, Petrarch relates in exquisite, poetic images his daily activities at his
summer residence in the Vaucluse.28 The letter is written in a simple style:
most of the sentences are short and use a plain vocabulary, and the overall

24
Henderson 1983a: 352; Fantazzi 2002: 49; Henderson 2002: 32–8; Martín Baños 2005: 444–5. For a
summary of the Ciceronian controversy, see DellaNeva and Duvick 2007: vii–xxxix.
25 26
Martín Baños 2005: 561–76. Martín Baños 2005: 614–15.
27
For further information on Demetrius and his treatise, see Kennedy 1994: 88–90.
28
For the text of the letter and notes, see Petrarch 2002–05: 4.177–83, 443–45. The English translation
is found in Petrarch 1982: 204–6.
260 jacqueline glomski
text is brief. After an opening statement of his renouncement of the wealth
and extravagance of city life for the simplicity of the countryside, Petrarch
races from topic to topic. He presents, first, a portrait of his caretaker’s
wife, her face parched and sunburnt like a Libyan or Ethiopian desert
(faciem, quam si videas, solitudinem lybicam aut ethiopicam putes te videre,
aridam penitus et vere solis ab ardoribus adustam faciem) (Ep. Fam. 13.8.3);
then a description of the sounds of the animals around him; then a
summary of his simple diet, consisting mainly of grapes, figs, nuts and
almonds, and a mention of his peasant-like clothing; and, finally, a short
tour of his gardens. His conversational style is reinforced by the use of
verbs for speaking (instead of writing) sprinkled throughout his text:
si loqui iubes (‘if you wish me to speak’), [Q]uid de auribus dicam? (‘What
shall I say about my ears?’), Quid de vestibus, quid de calceis loquar?
(‘What shall I say about my clothing and my footwear?’), Quid de habita-
culo dixerim? (‘What shall I say about my dwelling?’), . . . et si femineam
levitatem fateri oportet . . . (‘and, to confess my unmanly fickleness’). He
opens and closes his letter with direct address to his friend (si loqui iubes,
quid vis?) (‘if you wish me to speak’, ‘What do you wish, then?’), and at the
centre of his letter he says that he has no one to converse with except
himself. Petrarch maintains the air of conversation by punctuating his
letter with questions (as indicated above) that give the impression of him
thinking aloud, while they propel him from topic to topic.
Underlying this apparent improvisation is a sophisticated, highly crafted
text, centred on the images appealing to the senses, laced with classical
motifs and poetic imagery, and bound together by a series of contrasts.
Petrarch appeals to the reader’s senses when he refers to the parts of his
body – his eyes, ears, tongue and palate – as his enemies and his reasons for
wanting to withdraw from the city to the country. Dwelling first on sight,
then on hearing, speech and taste, before returning to his eyes, he claims
that he has freed himself from the chains of the material things he used to
crave and closed the eyes that he formerly wanted to please with these
things (Soluta sunt quibus ligabar vincula, clausique quibus placere cupiebam
oculi) (Ep. Fam. 13.8.11). The paradox is, of course, that deprivation
equals freedom.
Petrarch animates his letter with classical colouring, but in keeping with
the familiar, conversational tone, nothing here is obscure or recherché.
In his comparison of Avignon and the Vaucluse, he employs characteristic
motifs, mainly of Virgilian origin, to depict courtly luxury and extravagance
(aurum, gemmae, ebur, purpura) and harsh but beautiful rusticity, espe-
cially in the heat of the summer (ardentissimus sol, cicadae, Cancer, Leo). He
 Epistolary Writing 261
refers to his whole estate as a sort of Mount Helicon, sacred to the Muses.
He draws on Livy and Seneca for his mention of figures from Roman
history (Lucretia, Virginia, Tarquinius, Appius, Claranus). Images of
modesty and frugality and of abstinence and continence are bolstered by
the appearance of Cato and Fabricius, and an allusion to Juvenal reinforces
the description of the roughness of his country diet.29 Senecan themes of
withdrawal from the world, the avoidance of luxury and excess, the quiet
life of the scholar and the cultivation of a few intimate friends are central to
Petrarch’s text.
Finally, Petrarch constructs his letter around a series of antitheses, with
which he opposes life at the court in Avignon to life in the countryside.
His description of his caretaker’s wife, her face as dark as her soul is white
(quam fusca facies tam candidus est animus) (Ep. Fam. 13.8.4), implies the
opposite at Avignon, which sparkles on the outside with its gems and
ivory, but which is dark and corrupt within. He contrasts the sweetness of
song, pipe and lyre of the court with the bellowing of oxen, bleating of
sheep, songs of birds and murmuring of water in the countryside. At his
country estate, he contrasts his two gardens, one – shady, but at the edge of
a wilderness – is sacred to Apollo, the other – in a beautiful situation, more
civilized – to Bacchus.30 In conclusion, he proclaims that his summer
home would be perfect if only it were closer to Italy ([P]ossem forsan hic
vivere nisi vel tam procul Italia vel tam prope esset Avinio) (Fam. 13.8.16); that
his love of Italy delights and tempts him, while his hatred of Avignon
stings and revolts him. His soul is made miserable both by what he desires
and what he fears; he wishes only to be with Nelli and his few surviving
friends ([N]ichil est quod cupiam nisi te cum amicis qui rari superant, nichil
est quod metuam nisi reditum ad urbes) (Ep. Fam. 13.8.16).

Literary Style and Rhetorical Structure: Two Examples

from Erasmus and Muret
Petrarch’s stress on the letter as a conversation with an absent friend was
actually at odds with the concept of the letter influenced by the rhetorical
tradition, a strand of letter-writing that was popularized by Erasmus.31 In

29
Portraits of these figures (‘Cato’ most likely referring to both the elder and younger Cato) are found
in the writings of Valerius Maximus. When describing the coarseness of the rural diet, he states that
he prefers this sort of food to delicacies, which Juvenal (Sat. 11.206–8) claims can only be tolerated
for five days anyway (Petrarch 2002–05: 4.444).
30
A reference, as Ugo Dotti notes, to the two summits of Mount Parnassus (Petrarch 2004: 445).
31
Henderson 1993: 154; Henderson 2002: 32.
262 jacqueline glomski
practice, though, as Erasmus’ own writing shows, neo-Latin writers man-
aged to construct non-utilitarian letters around a petitio and still fill them
with an air of familiarity. A thank-you letter from Erasmus to his patron
Anton Fugger and a request for information from Marc-Antoine Muret to
the medical doctor Giacomo Canani illustrate how a rhetoricized epistle
could be personalized and given a veneer of spontaneity, while displaying
an impressive classical erudition and a thorough command of Ciceronian
Latin. Careful self-fashioning makes these letters prime examples both of
the intertwining of the notions ‘public’ and ‘private’ in epistolary writing
of the time and of the literary values of neo-Latin letters: both of these
letters were published during the authors’ lifetimes.
Erasmus’ letter of 7 July 1529 to the banking magnate Anton Fugger has
a double aim: to persuade Fugger to accept Erasmus’ thanks for Fugger’s
gift of a gold cup and also to accept his refusal of Fugger’s offer of a
residence in Augsburg.32 Although Erasmus personalizes the letter with
some details of his own life, this is a learned composition based on a
rhetorical structure, where colour and interest are supplied by the use of
aphorisms, commonplaces and exempla. Erasmus’ flowing style, his expert
handling of transitions and smooth integration of aphorisms and classical
references into his text give the letter a natural and sincere quality, which
expresses Erasmus’ esteem for Fugger’s friendship.
Even though in his handbook on letter-writing Erasmus rejected the
traditional division of a letter into five sections,33 in this letter to Fugger
five sections can be identified that loosely correspond to these traditional
parts. After a simple salutation (salutatio), Erasmus begins his exordium
with general remarks on the nature of friendship – that good friends are
not always found where one expects – which leads him into sketching out
the nature of their friendship and taking up the praises of Fugger. To
ensure the sincerity of his laudatio, Erasmus includes a few personal details:
Fugger’s acquisition of his fortune through industriousness (not illicit
means) and his concern for the education of children. From this Erasmus
proceeds to give his reason for writing (causa/intentio) – he is responding
to a letter he has received from Fugger – which begins his narratio (the
statement of the facts, here a summary of their correspondence). Then, at
the centre of the text, Erasmus presents his main argument, his request
(petitio) that Fugger should accept his sincere thanks for the gold cup that

32
The text with notes is Allen, Ep. 2192 (Erasmus 1906–58: 8.223–6). It was first printed in the Opus
epistolarum (Basel, 1529), 970.
33
Erasmus 1971: 301.
 Epistolary Writing 263
he has sent along as a gift with his letter. Again, sincerity is confirmed
through personal detail: the cup will represent Fugger’s friendship and
affection, for even water drunk from this cup will taste like honey-wine
(Ex tam amico poculo quid ni vel aqua mulsum sapiat?) (Ep. 2192.61–2); and
when drinking from Fugger’s cup, even if he is not drinking wine (for
health reasons), the taste will be more pleasurable because he will be tasting
Fugger’s affection (amorem) (Ep. 2192.71–2). After stating that he does not
know how he will ever reciprocate Fugger’s kindness to him, he moves to
his second request, to ask Fugger to accept his refusal (again) of his
invitation for him to come and live in Augsburg. Erasmus aims to convince
him that it is his health that prevents him from making a long journey and
not a matter of the amount of remuneration offered or the status of the
person making the offer; he would much prefer a sincere friend to all the
treasures of the kings (Ego candidum amicum omnibus regum gazis ante-
posuerim) (Ep. 2192.89–90). Erasmus concludes (conclusio) his letter by
responding to Fugger’s news of the religious situation at Augsburg, con-
gratulating him that the city is managing to maintain stability in uncertain
times. He wishes Fugger good health and expresses his appreciation of and
commitment to their friendship.
Erasmus’ letter seems spontaneous and intimate, in spite of its rhet-
orical structure and its erudition. Erasmus writes in an elegant but
relaxed style, varying the length and construction of his sentences so that
one sentence flows smoothly into the next.34 Although his grammar can
be complex, nowhere does his prose get bogged down in a complicated
chain of clauses. His vocabulary is standard; for sophistication he
includes a Greek phrase or two. Erasmus animates his letter with exempla
from ancient history or classical mythology, as when he contrasts Fug-
ger’s good use of money honestly earned to the elder Vespasian’s good
use of ill-earned money or when he compares the state of imperial
finances to the leaky water-jars of the Danaids. He expertly uses quota-
tions from ancient literature – both classical and biblical – to enhance his
meaning, as in his introduction where he refers to the Iliad (24.527–8)
and to Ecclesiasticus (6.15) (the former stating that human life is a
mixture of happiness and sadness; the latter that a faithful friend has

34
Erasmus does not recommend in De conscribendis epistolis any particular style for letter-writing
(because the letter is a heterogeneous genre) but he believes that letters should be written in a clear,
elegant language, without affectation (Erasmus 1971: 222, 226–7). Tunberg 2004: 161 describes
Erasmus’ style as being ‘remarkable for a fluidity that stems from an immense variety of construction
and vocabulary’.
264 jacqueline glomski
no price).35 And he injects humour into his text, referring to his own
‘Adages’ when mentioning how he has given up horseback riding, saying
that he has gone not from horses to donkeys, but from horses to his own
two feet (non ab equis ad asinos, vt habet prouerbium, sed in pedes deiectus)
(Ep. 2192.66–7).36
In the autumn of 1562 the French classical scholar Marc-Antoine Muret
(Muretus),37 then in the employment of Cardinal Ippolito d’Este, wrote
four letters to Giacomo Canani, a medical doctor of Ferrara, with whom
he had become friendly. The letters were written from France, where
Muret was travelling as part of the cardinal’s larger entourage during his
mission as papal legate at the outbreak of the Wars of Religion. Muret’s
letter of 6 October is another particularly interesting example of a persua-
sive letter based around a petition.38 Muret was known for his oratorical
abilities; indeed, he was carrying out the role of an orator as part of
Cardinal Ippolito’s embassy to France, and, unquestionably, his letter to
Canani uses rhetorical strategy.
As with Erasmus’ letter, a reliance on the five traditional parts can be
detected. After a simple salutatio, the exordium announces, in a striking
manner, Muret’s recovery from an illness: Convalui. Hoc me gratius aut
optatius tibi epistolae principium reperire nullum posse, certe scio (‘I have
recovered. That I could find no beginning for my letter to you that was
more pleasing or desired than this, I know for certain’) (Epist. 26.1–2). This
introduction goes on to detail the nature of Muret’s fever (Febris fuit
tertiana duplex, qualem tu a me tertio abhinc anno Ferrariae depulisti . . .
Itaque octavo me die, postquam corripuerat, reliquit (‘The fever was a double
tertian, the sort of which you drove from me at Ferrara three years ago . . .
And so on the eighth day after it had seized me, it left’) (Epist. 26.2–5), and
continues with an acknowledgement to Muret’s doctor and other col-
leagues for their care. The narratio follows, in which Muret considers
whether the cardinal will return to Italy in the middle of winter or wait
until spring: Quanquam enim tuae litterae certa prope et explorata nunciant:
non desunt tamen hic, qui sponsione certare parati sint, nos in Gallia
hybernaturos (‘Although, indeed, your letter announces almost certain

35
Erasmus 1906–58: viii, 223. Erasmus’ predilection for maxims and exempla are characteristic of his
writing (Tunberg 2004: 160–1). The handbook of the late-antique pseudo-Libanius recommended
the use of historical exempla and proverbs to bring charm to letters (Reed 1997: 177).
36
‘Ab equis ad asinos’, Adagia 1.7.29, to denote that someone has left an honourable undertaking for
something less reputable. See Erasmus 1906–58: viii, 224 and Erasmus 1989: 83.
37
For a biography of this neglected neo-Latin writer, see Dejob 1970.
38
For the text with notes, see Muret 1834: 61–2.
 Epistolary Writing 265
and confirmed things, there are yet those here who are prepared to wager
that we will spend the winter in France’) (Epist. 26.19–21). Muret’s petitio is
a request for Canani to send him any news he has regarding their departure
for Italy; he would like to know so that he can make preparations: . . .
obsecro obtestorque te per amicitiam nostram, ut expiscere, si potes, aliquid
certi, idque ad me scribas quam poteris certissime. Permagni mea interest, scire
quid futurum sit, propterea quod consilium mihi ad rationem itineris dirigen-
dum est . . . (‘. . . I beg and implore you, by our friendship, to find out, if
you can, something certain and to write it to me as most precisely as you
can. It is of very great importance to me to know what the future is because
I must draw up a plan for the reckoning of the journey . . .’) (Epist. 26.
43–6). If the information is to be kept secret, he promises that he will
reveal it to no one. Muret ends very briefly: he wishes Canani well and
communicates greetings from himself and his entourage.
Muret’s letter, an example of brevitas and claritas, creates an air of
friendship and intimacy in order to persuade Canani to fulfil his request.
Muret’s opening, relating his illness and treatment, serves to dispose
Canani to him, both by arousing his sympathy and by mentioning that
Canani cured him of a similar illness three years before (Febris fuit tertiana
duplex, qualem tu a me tertio abhinc anno Ferrariae depulisti, Epist. 26.2–3).
Muret further solicits Canani’s emotions by calling attention to the quality
of care he has received from his doctor Angelus Iustinianus and the others
surrounding him; this once again links Canani to him and adds an aura of
comradeship because Canani knew most of the men mentioned. Like
Erasmus, Muret begins his narratio with his reason for writing (causa/
intentio): now that he is well, he desires a return to Italy. Within the
narratio Muret includes compliments of his employer, the cardinal; this is
as much as a matter of showing respect for his boss as it is of calling
attention to his association, like that of Canani, with this eminent man.
Muret then makes his petition clear: of everyone in his group, he is the one
who desires most to go back to Italy immediately; so could Canani give
him any information he can find out so that he can make his plans. Here
he appeals directly to their friendship: obsecro obtestorque te per amicitiam
nostram (Epist. 26.43). Muret’s concluding remark, that he will keep the
information hushed if necessary, seeks to gain Canani’s confidence, and
reinforces, through the image of secrecy, Muret’s expression of intimacy.
Muret reinforces these strategies with his Latin style, which has such
oratorical qualities that the letter demands to be read aloud. Admittedly,
the grammar of this letter is difficult, with Muret favouring the use of
participles, gerunds and compound verb forms; exploiting constructions
266 jacqueline glomski
involving the oblique cases (genitive of value, double dative, ablative
of manner, ablative of means, etc.); and relying on indirect statement.
Muret’s sentences are mostly complex, periodic structures, of the type
traditionally perceived as Ciceronian.39 Nevertheless, Muret entertains his
reader/listener with a variety of flourishes such as alliteration and climactic
series, even in the same sentence: Omnino et ipsius et omnium qui hic sunt,
sed praecipue ipsius et Petri Normesini mirificum quendam expertus sum in
me amorem, miram in curanda valetudine mea sollicitudinem, sedulita-
tem, assiduitatem (Epist. 26.8–11).40 Muret simplifies his constructions
when opening or closing an idea and so uses linguistic form to emphasize
his meaning. For example, he immediately captures the attention of the
reader by starting his letter with a sentence of one word, Convalui (‘I have
recovered’) and then ends his exordium with Mihi credere, tanti erat aegrotare
(‘Believe me, it was worth being ill’) (Epist. 26.17) fabricating a neat linguis-
tic/semantic package. The next section, on the question of the date of the
return to Italy, he opens also with a short sentence, Nunc confirmatus avide
exspecto, quid vos istinc scribatis de nostro in Italiam reditu (‘Now
strengthened, I eagerly await what you were writing from where you are
about our return to Italy’), and brings it to an abrupt close: Quare si aliud
nihil obstiterit, ibimus, vel si caelum ruat (‘Wherefore, if nothing else stands in
the way, we shall go, even if the sky falls down’) (Epist. 26.17–18; 31–2).
Erasmus’ and Muret’s letters contain significant elements of self-
fashioning; both demonstrate how neo-Latin writers thought of letters as
artistic works, in which the author constructs an image of himself for his
contemporaries and posterity, and how the modern distinction of ‘private’ or
‘public’ was immaterial.41 When Erasmus declines Fugger’s invitation to take
up residence in Augsburg, he states that what he previously wrote to Fugger –
that he had declined very attractive offers from various princes – was written
to convince Fugger that his health would not permit him to travel and not to
compare Fugger, in rank or generosity, with his other patrons. His self-
aggrandizement loses its subtlety as he goes into some detail of the generosity
of the emperor and King Ferdinand towards him. He notes as well the failure
of the emperor to pay the pension promised him. These frank remarks about
the emperor’s finances were, evidently, not intended forever to be for Fugger’s
eyes only. Likewise, Muret, when recounting the story of his recovery from

39
For comments on Muret’s ‘moderate’ Ciceronianism, see Tunberg 1997: 48–50.
40
Effects of this sort are difficult or impossible to reproduce in translation; bold type is used in this
extract to direct attention to some key structural and alliterative elements.
41
Henderson 1993: 155–6, 158; Henderson 2002: 29–30.
 Epistolary Writing 267
the fever, details not only the care he was given but by whom. The naming of
these individuals – Petrus Normesinus, Bartholomaeus Ferrus, Hieronymus
Lippomannus and Abbas Rossettus – takes on a vivid hue of self-
aggrandizement as soon as the letter is published, with Muret now broadcast-
ing his connections to an audience wider than Canani alone. The same can be
said of Muret’s mention of Cardinal Ippolito and his praises of him. Further-
more, the fact that Muret, in his 1580 edition of his correspondence, placed
this letter to Canani as the first of the four that he wrote to the doctor, when it
actually occurred chronologically as the second, demonstrates how Muret
used his letters to fashion his autobiography: Muret presumably rearranged
the letters to introduce the figure of Canani and clarify his relationship to him
before proceeding to describe the events of the war taking place around him.42

Lipsius and the Letter as the ‘Mirror of the Soul’

The motif of the letter as a mirror of the soul, as promoted by Justus Lipsius
in his Epistolica institutio,43 placed emphasis on the character of the writer
and was actually a form of self-presentation, or even self-fashioning.44 This
topos, linked to composing a text that would make absent friends present,
is also connected to writing in a plain style and giving the impression of
spontaneity.45 Lipsius’ goal was that the pupil should attain a personal,
idiomatic style and should develop his identity as a writer. Lipsius viewed
the letter as the genre of writing that perfectly reflected the character or
talent of the writer, and in his own correspondence, the ‘self’ became an
important topic.46 Moreover, Lipsius advocated a conversational style
in letter-writing, one that abandoned the high style of public oratory; he
claimed that epistolary style should be marked by brevity and simplicity,
but also by elegance and decorum.47
In his letter of 20 November 1600 to Erycius Puteanus (1574–1646), in
which he congratulates Puteanus on his appointment to the chair of elo-
quence at the Schola Palatina in Milan, Lipsius reconciles the two apparently
opposing concepts of brevitas and suavitas to produce a text full of clarity and
coherence, but also of sophistication and elegance.48 Lipsius begins his letter

42
IJsewijn 1985: 186. IJsewijn (187) sees Muret’s collected correspondence as ‘the revenge of an old
man, who publishes the proof of his successful career in the very town from whence he was
ignominiously exiled in his youth’.
43 44 45
Martín Baños 2005: 583. Henderson 2002: 23. Henderson 1993: 154.
46 47
Henderson 2002: 37; Martín Baños 2005: 445. Lipsius 1996: 22–5.
48
On Puteanus, see Sacré 2000. Puteanus had studied with Lipsius at the Collegium Trilingue in
Louvain and then went to Milan in 1597 with letters of recommendation from Lipsius, in search of
268 jacqueline glomski
with his congratulations to Puteanus, but he then amplifies this topic so that
the letter turns into a reflection on the ephemerality of life. In his praise of
Puteanus, Lipsius encourages him to take advantage of the present opportun-
ity and of his youth to develop his career, but to remain modest and keep away
from vainglory. He refers to their common friend Gian-Vicenzo Pinelli who,
sadly, is close to death. Then, at the very centre of the letter, Lipsius compares
life to the stage, saying how when the actor has finished his scenes, he takes off
his mask and costume, and gladly goes home; so our soul goes from this
temporary theatre to its heavenly home (Ut in scaena partes qui peregit,
personam vestemque ponit et libens domum abit, sic noster hic animus a
temporario theatro in aetheream illam sedem) (Ep. 2897.10–12). Lipsius then
discusses his own health: he mentions that he has had a serious bout of
bronchitis, from which he has only partially recovered. He finishes off by
saying that he is looking forward to seeing the edition of Puteanus’ letters
and that the edition of his own letters, those to Italians and Spaniards, will
be out soon. Lipsius closes by asking Puteanus to greet Giambattista Sacco
as well as their other friends in Milan, Fredericus Quinctius and Ludovicus
Septalius.
Clearly, Lipsius does not base his letter on a petition and the five
traditional parts of the letter are not involved here; rather, Lipsius dwells
on himself. The letter moves from a laudatio of Puteanus and Lipsius’
recommendations for him to Lipsius’ reflections on life, with the transition
made through a maxim and an allusion to the classics (te attolle semper ab
humo, ut absis a fumo (‘raise yourself up always from the ground so that
you may be far from smoke [i.e. vainglory]’); [s]icut ille ab igne oculos . . .
inumbrat (‘just as that one shades his eyes from fire’), Ep. 2897.7–8).49 The
letter is compactly organized, with a concrete opening (laudatio), a central
focus (contemplation of the brevity of life), and an ending containing
Lipsius’ personal news (his illness, the publication of his correspondence).
Brevitas is accomplished through concision – by not resting at length on
any one topic – and through the succinctness of his sentences: Lipsius avoids
periodic structures and any drawn-out ornate phrases.50 A cultured style is

work. After Lipsius’ death in 1606, Puteanus would return to Louvain and take over as his successor.
This letter was first printed in Iusti Lipsi epistolarum selectarum centuria secunda ad Belgas (Antwerp,
1605). For the text with notes, see Lipsius 2000.
49
As Jan Papy notes (Lipsius 2000: 295), Lipsius’ maxim is explained by Erasmus’ comments at
Adagia 4.8.83 (‘Fumus’); and his allusion is to the incident of Democritus going blind by gazing at
the sun, as found in Cicero, Tusc. 5.39.114; Cicero, Fin., 5.87; Gell., 10.17. For Lipsius’ remarks on
the use of proverbs, etc. in the Institutio, see Lipsius 1996: 32–3.
50
Lipsius’ style is described in detail by Tunberg 1999.
 Epistolary Writing 269
achieved through conceptista figures that keep the text lively and interesting.
The first sentence begins with repetition (Laetum mihi, laetum te . . .) and
then moves on to marked alliteration: laetum mihi, laetum te muneri huic
publico admotum, in quo exseri atque exerceri ingenium et industria tua possint
(‘I am delighted that you have been promoted to this public office, in which
your industry and intelligence may be fully exercised and demonstrated’).
He even exploits the rhythm and rhyme of paronomasia (nisi ea nixae, nisi ea
nexae; te attolle semper ab humo, ut absis a fumo). The key to Lipsius’
combination of brevitas with venustas is a simple matter of decorum, ‘when
everything is aptly and appropriately written’.51

Dedicatory Letters and Letters of Recommendation

In spite of Petrarch’s pleas in the fourteenth century for a familiar letter
based on the correspondence of Cicero, Pliny and Seneca, letter-writing
nevertheless came to be regarded as formulaic and by the end of the
fifteenth century it was being taught as an art of persuasion.52 The
humanists’ enthusiasm for classical rhetoric worked against the wholesale
adoption of the epistola familiaris.53 The extent to which neo-Latin letters
could adhere to formulism was found in dedicatory letters and letters of
recommendation, which were related to literary letters.54 Dedicatory
letters, which prefaced a book being offered to a patron, increased expo-
nentially from the second half of the fifteenth century onwards, as authors
and editors (the latter of both classical and contemporary works) competed
fiercely for patronage. Dedicatory letters connected writers and editors
with patrons, promoted the sale of books and so contributed to the spread
of literacy.55 A further related category, letters of recommendation, also
played an important role in the Republic of Letters even though such
letters may have only seldom been published during an author’s lifetime.
Letters of recommendation created or reinforced the bonds between
scholars (in the sense that they were often part of reciprocal exchanges
of favours) and also formed an essential element in the patronage system
(where the guarantee of an authority would influence the outcome of
a request).56

51
As he states in the Institutio (Lipsius 1996: 32–3): . . . cum omnia apte et convenienter scripta.
52 53
Henderson 1993: 149, 151. Henderson 1983a: 339.
54
Clough 1976: 46–7. IJsewijn and Sacré 1998: 219, however, view dedicatory letters as related to
utilitarian letter-writing.
55 56
Glomski 2007: 62–3; Enekel 2008: 40. Waquet 2010b: 151–53.
270 jacqueline glomski
Written exclusively for publication, dedicatory letters were never ‘pri-
vate’; rather, they put the writer’s reputation at stake by demanding
conformity to an ostentatious rhetoric.57 These letters required the dedi-
catee, the author/editor of the book, the book itself and the reading public
all to be taken into account, and resulted in an acute tension between an
apparent humility and an underlying self-promotion on the part of their
author. This tension was expressed in a linguistic irony: a text expressing
humility and self-deprecation formulated in a highly sophisticated and
stylized language that was meant to transmit the values of erudition,
cultural sophistication, piety and diligence.58 While the use of simple
diminutives to refer to the author/editor and his book became character-
istic,59 so did more elaborate strategies, such as the (over-)use of proverbs
and adages, which, by covering obvious intentions with obscurity, pro-
vided an elegant mode of expression.60 Such an emphasis on modesty
was not required in the literary, non-utilitarian letters cited above. We
note for example that Erasmus, in his letter to Fugger, praises him at
length and expresses a deep appreciation of his friendship and generosity,
but he does not humble himself before Fugger. Like dedicatory letters,
letters of recommendation, because they were based upon petitio
(a request on behalf of the person being recommended), were tied to a
highly rhetorical formula.61

Conclusion
It would not be until the end of the sixteenth century that, in conjunction
with the anti-Ciceronian movement as exemplified in the writing of
Lipsius, neo-Latin authors would liberate themselves from the doctrine
of strict imitatio, and the rhetorical and formulaic aspects of letter-writing.
Still, Lipsius’ style had, in the long run, little impact on neo-Latin writers;
the vein of ‘moderate’ Ciceronianism – an overall admiration for the
authors of the ‘Golden Age’, but also a reaction against extremism of any

57
The principles of writing dedicatory letters in neo-Latin are discussed by Glomski 2002: 165–82 and
Glomski 2007: 62–71.
58 59
Kiss 2008: 141. Glomski 2007: 64, 66; De Landtsheer 2008: 258.
60
Kiss 2008: 141–2. Allusions to the classics were, of course, a similar, popular strategy (Glomski
2007: 67).
61
Waquet 2010b: 130, 132–3. Waquet gives a thorough analysis of the letters of recommendation of
Gerardus Joannes Vossius. Morford 2002: 185–9 summarizes the treatment of letters of
recommendation in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century handbooks on epistolography. He
remarks how Lipsius refused to be bound by the rules of rhetoric and succeeded in achieving a
certain informality in his letters of recommendation (190, 198).
 Epistolary Writing 271
kind in neo-Latin style – that was espoused by Muret and the teachers of
the Jesuit order, remained the norm for neo-Latin prose during the
seventeenth century.62 Epistolary writing was, within the constraints of
its genre, a laboratory for trends in neo-Latin style and textual composition
in general.

FURTHER READING
Scholarship on neo Latin epistolography, overall, has tended to concentrate on
the theoretical aspect of the genre, with Martín Baños 2005 as the most
comprehensive survey to date. His bibliography is extremely valuable as a guide
to the extensive secondary literature on Renaissance letter writing as well as to
editions of primary sources. Still useful, though, as general, concise introductions
to humanist epistolography, are Clough 1976, Fumaroli 1978, and Henderson’s
series of essays (1983a, 1983b, 1993, 2002, 2007). The volumes edited by
Worstbrock (1983), Gerlo (1985), McConica (1989) and especially Van Houdt
et al. (2002) contain important articles on individual writers and their letters.
More recently, De Landtsheer (2014a and 2014b) and Papy (2015) have provided
an overview of the style and content of the major humanist letter collections.
Dedicatory letters and letters of recommendation are covered by Glomski 2007,
Bossuyt et al. 2008, Waquet 2010b, and Verbeke and De Landtsheer 2014.
In addition, the correspondence of prominent seventeenth century intellectuals
is discussed by Nellen 1993.

62
Tunberg 1999: 178; Tunberg 2004: 166–7.
 chapter 16

Oratory and Declamation

Marc Van der Poel

Introductory Remarks
On Easter Sunday, 8 April 1341, on the Capitol at Rome, Francesco
Petrarca (Petrarch, 1304–74) was crowned poet laureate and delivered a
speech on the art of poetry which heralded the birth of humanist oratory.
Although this speech, usually called Collatio Laureationis, has the five-part
structure typical of a medieval sermon, it shows traces of Cicero’s speech
on poetry and the liberal arts, the Pro Archia, which Petrarch had found in
Liège in 1333.1 The history of humanistic oratory and declamation truly
began around the end of the fourteenth century, with the work of Antonio
Loschi, Sicco Polenton and Gasparino Barzizza on Cicero’s orations.
Between 1390 and 1396 Loschi (1368–1441) wrote a commentary on eleven
speeches by Cicero, the Inquisitio super undecim orationes Ciceronis; in
1413 Polenton (1375–1447) produced commentaries on sixteen further
speeches, the Argumenta super aliquot orationibus et invectivis Ciceronis.2
Gasparino Barzizza (1360–1431) gave lectures on Cicero’s speeches and
published a commentary on fifteen of them in 1420.3 Other important
developments were Poggio Bracciolini’s (1380–1459) discovery, in 1416, of
Asconius Pedianus’ commentaries on eight speeches by Cicero and the
complete text of Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria,4 and Gerardo Landriani’s
(d. 1445) discovery of Cicero’s De oratore, Orator and Brutus in 1421.5
Although the Quattrocento Italian humanists stood firmly in the two
medieval traditions of prose composition and letter-writing (ars dictami-
nis) and of political debate and delivery of speeches at ceremonies in the
city states of Italy (ars arengandi),6 the rediscovery of many ancient

1
On the Collatio Laureatonis, see Buffano 1975: 2, 1255–83 for the Latin text; English translation in
Wilkins 1953. Looney 2009 offers a brief analysis.
2 3
Mercer 1979: 93. Gualdo Rosa 1997.
4
See Poggio’s letter to Guarino da Verona announcing these discoveries (Gordan 1974: 195).
5 6
Reynolds and Wilson 1991: 139. Camargo 1991, Koch 1992, Cox 2003.

272
 Oratory and Declamation 273
writings concerning rhetoric and eloquence did constitute a sort of new
beginning. The body of ancient theories of eloquence and the surviving
orations and declamations (in the latter category especially the Major
Declamations ascribed to Quintilian) formed a fresh starting point for
everybody in Renaissance Europe who wrote on rhetoric, composed
prose texts or wrote and delivered speeches.
The most important means by which the study of eloquence continued
to occupy centre stage during the Renaissance is the educational pro-
gramme of the studia humanitatis, which was introduced everywhere in
Europe. This curriculum, taught at grammar schools and in the university
faculties of arts, consisted of a substantial programme of reading and
analysing classical texts on the one hand and continuous exercises in
writing and speaking Latin on the other. The writing of themes, and the
writing and delivery of classical-style orations in one of the three classical
genera causarum (judicial, deliberative and demonstrative) were standard
classroom exercises. Declamatio, that is, writing a complete oration and
delivering it before an audience, constituted the pinnacle of this method of
teaching. This exercise was reserved for students in the highest grades of
grammar schools and in the faculties of arts. We will see that in the course
of the second half of the sixteenth century, there seems to have been a
development towards concentrating the exercise of declamatio on memory
and delivery to the detriment of invention, arrangement and style; one
factor that may have contributed to this development is simply the diffi-
culty of writing original speeches.7
In spite of this very strong continuity of classical pedagogical practice,
the different historical circumstances of the Renaissance transformed the
place and functions of eloquence in society. In ancient Greece and Rome,
eloquence functioned in three vital areas of society: in the lawcourts, in the
various kinds of citizen councils and in formal meetings pertaining to
the public sphere, such as state funerals or official commemorations, where
orators delivered speeches of praise or blame. In the Renaissance, however,
public speaking was confined to the domain of ceremonies and private or
public social gatherings of all kinds (diplomatic missions, university cere-
monies, religious events, weddings, etc.), in which no decision of any kind
had to be made and the delivery of an oration usually had a purely
ornamental function. The writing of judicial and political orations and
declamations was also revived in the Renaissance, but these were always

7
For a brief summary of the place and development of declamatio in sixteenth-century schools north
of the Alps, see Van der Poel 1987: 348–50.
274 marc van der poel
texts written to be read only by a general readership, and were never meant
to be used in the professional fields of lawyers and politicians. Thus,
although the classical framework of the three branches of oratory con-
tinued to be in use during the Renaissance, a more significant distinction
was that of works intended for delivery before an audience and those that
were only to be read. In the present contribution we will discuss these two
classes separately.

Speeches and Declamations Written to be Delivered

Before discussing examples of epideictic speeches written to be delivered, it
is useful to present a few observations concerning the subject of delivery.
In antiquity, actio or pronuntiatio (‘delivery’) was considered by many as
the most important of the five tasks of the orator (inventio/invention,
dispositio/arrangement, elocutio/style, memoria/memory, actio or pronuntia-
tio/delivery), because the impact of a speech depended largely on the
emotional force with which the orator was able to impress his arguments
on the audience.8 Ancient rhetors gave detailed rules on the handling of
the voice and body movement in order to maximize the emotional effect
upon the audience. In the Renaissance, attention to delivery implied not
only concern for a proper use of voice and gesture, but also for other
aspects of speech and speaking.
In the early days of humanist education in Italy, delivery had primarily
to do with correct pronunciation of Latin. Bartolemeo Platina (1421–81)
records in his biography of Vittorino da Feltre (1378–1448), who founded
one of the first humanist schools in Mantua, that Vittorino wanted to hear
his pupils frequently read and declaim in order to correct any mistake in
pronunciation they might make.9 But attention to delivery could also
imply considerations of euphony; for example, Battista Guarino (Guarini)
(1374–1460), the famous school teacher from Verona, attached much
weight to prose rhythm and metrics, and therefore paid a great deal of
attention to delivery.10 Furthermore, delivery had even wider ramifica-
tions, for the ability to speak gracefully in public constituted, in conjunc-
tion with a good posture, an important element of Renaissance
gentlemanly ideal as described in Baldassare Castiglione’s authoritative
description of Renaissance court life in Il cortegiano (‘The Courtier’, 1529).
Castiglione speaks about the two components of delivery – voice and

8 9 10
Quintilian, Inst. 11.3.1–9. Garin 1958: 684. See Kallendorf 2002: 274–6.
 Oratory and Declamation 275
movement – in a passage explicitly devoted to oratory,11 but it is clear from
the context that these were in fact important components of Castiglione’s
ideal of the perfect gentleman, which had an enormous influence through-
out Europe.12
In Renaissance Europe outside Italy, Latin pronunciation constituted
somewhat of a problem, in so far as Latin was spoken with different
accents according to the speaker’s nationality. Thus, differences in pro-
nunciation could lead to the complete frustration of effective communi-
cation, as is recorded by Erasmus in a well-known anecdote about a
ceremony in which welcome speeches were delivered by orators of several
nationalities: they all spoke in Latin, but with such heavy accents that they
failed to make themselves understood by their audience.13 Even if we allow
for a certain degree of playful exaggeration in Erasmus’ account, his story
helps to remind us that in spite of the ubiquity of Latin in literate
communities and its unchallenged status as a lingua franca throughout
Europe, Latin remained in the Renaissance what it had been since the end
of antiquity, a ‘language in search of a community’.14 It was perhaps an
awareness of the difficulties surrounding spoken Latin, on top of the
perception that the function of oratory was restricted to purely formal
occasions, which stimulated Erasmus and other humanists of his time to
neglect delivery in their descriptions of humanist education.
There is, in fact, only one field in which Erasmus did see an effective role
for delivery, that is, the field of sacred oratory. Erasmus was critical of the
practice of preaching and wrote a detailed art of preaching, which was based
entirely upon classical rhetoric. In this work, he discussed in detail the
proper use in the pulpit of voice and body, advocating moderation as more
effective than exaggerated effects.15 Although the Ecclesiastes is very learned,
it is also an eminently practical handbook written to assist parish priests in
their task of teaching their congregations, which Erasmus considered the
most important of their duties.16 Erasmus’ work is thus of a completely
different nature to the important body of later sixteenth-century guides to
sacred rhetoric which advocated the so-called Christian grand style in Latin
sermons, and which exercised a great deal of influence on the high culture

11 12 13
Castiglione 1967: 76–7. Burke 1996. See Van der Poel 2007: 123–4.
14
Burke 2004: 43–60 (chapter 2).
15
Erasmus 1991–4: 2.16–44, lines 215–786. This is a very informative passage on preaching style at
the time.
16
Erasmus 1991–4: 1.198–202, lines 274–98. He also advocates a good knowledge of the audience’s
vernacular language (1.262–4, lines 359–415), including reading the best vernacular authors, such as
Dante and Petrarch in Italian (1.264, lines 392–5).
276 marc van der poel
of that time.17 On the other hand, the emphasis Erasmus laid on delivery in
the context of preaching to the laity was not new.18
Erasmus’ contemporary Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560) does not dis-
cuss actio in his De rhetorica libri tres (first ed. 1519), and confines himself
to stating briefly that memory and pronunciation are natural gifts, and
that whatever can be learned may be gathered from other authors who
have written on rhetoric.19 In the same vein, Juan Luis Vives (1493–1540)
described pronuntiatio as an ornament rather than a true part of rhetoric;
according to Vives, an orator can perform his task by writing alone.20 At
the same time, however, both Melanchthon and Vives did include
declamatio, that is, the writing and delivering of a fully fledged oration,
in their description of the arts curriculum. Melanchthon in fact introduced
declamatio as an exercise in the arts faculty of the University of Wittenberg
in 1523, and he also placed the exercise of scribere et recitare declamationem
(‘to write and deliver a declamation’) on his programme of the Latin
school, which formed the blueprint for the Lutheran schools throughout
Germany.21
As we mentioned above, the exercise of declamatio, which included the
performance of the five tasks of the orator (invention, arrangement, style,
memory, delivery) constituted the culmination of the humanist arts
curriculum. However, in the second half of the sixteenth century decla-
matio increasingly tended to be restricted to the elegant delivery of an
already written text. Several documents pertaining to the exercise of
declamatio in Sturm’s gymnasium in Strasburg, which I have discussed
elsewhere, are indicators of this development.22 Another illustration of this
trend is the existence of a close connection in humanistic schools of that
period between training in eloquence on the one hand and school theatre
on the other. Numerous examples of the close connection between speech
delivery and stage performances in schools could be mentioned; the vast
literature on Jesuit theatre offers a good access to this subject matter.23
Similarly, in Sturm’s gymnasium performances of a paraphrase of an
ancient oration or poem, or of an ancient trial featuring two or more

17
On Renaissance sacred oratory see O’Malley 1979, focusing on the papal court in Rome; Fumaroli
1980, on France; and Shuger 1988, on England.
18
See for instance the Franciscan preacher Johann Meder on the importance of delivery: Meder 1495:
fol. aijr v. I owe this reference to Pietro Delcorno MA (Radboud University Nijmegen).
19
Melanchthon 1519: Aiijv. 20
Vives 1785: 6.160.
21
Van der Poel 1987: 346. Vives also included the delivery of declamations in his school curriculum:
Vives 1785: 6.361.
22 23
Van der Poel 2007: 276–8. Griffin 1976 and 1986, McCabe 1983, Filippi 2006.
 Oratory and Declamation 277
orations were held by the students, and Sturm explicitly compared these
performances to the performance of tragedies.24
Besides delivery, the Renaissance theory of epideictic eloquence also
merits our attention because of the differences from its classical counter-
part. In the Renaissance, as we have seen above, eloquence could properly
function only in the domain of ceremonies in which no decisions were
made. Hence, the genus demonstrativum always came third after the other
two genera in antiquity, whereas many Renaissance theories and hand-
books place it first or second after the genus deliberativum. In addition, the
treatment of the loci (topics) for praise and blame, and, especially after
c. 1550, the discussion of the techniques for amplificatio (amplification) is
usually more far more detailed than in classical handbooks. Moreover,
Melanchthon distinguished explicitly between two functions of the epideic-
tic genre, that is, teaching on the one hand and moving on the other; in his
Elementa rhetorices (‘Elements of Rhetoric’, 1531), he introduced a separate
genus for the teaching function, the genus didascalicum or didacticon.25
Finally, Renaissance theorists defined different categories of occasional
speeches, reflecting the manifold events at which public speeches were
delivered, such as speeches at weddings or birthdays, thanksgiving or
recommendation speeches and funerary speeches.26
Within the genre of epideictic speeches written to be delivered in
public, the speeches delivered in an academic or religious setting probably
constitute the largest corpus. There exists a huge body of such speeches,
delivered in particular at the opening of the academic year or at the
beginning of a course. The tradition of opening the academic year with
a public speech by a prominent professor goes back to the time when
universities were first founded, and while many such speeches from the
Renaissance survive in manuscript only, many others were published, often
because their author was a famous scholar. For instance, a series of editions
of Melanchthon’s academic speeches delivered by himself or by others at
the University of Wittenberg were published from at least 1533 onwards
until his death.27 In some cases collections of academic orations were
reprinted until long after their authors’ death, because they were deemed
worthy as stylistic models.28

24
Van der Poel 2007: 277.
25
Melanchthon 2001: 32, 40–54. Melanchthon’s new genus was adopted by Luis de Granada in his
Rhetorica ecclesiastica sive de ratione concionandi (1576); see Van der Poel 1987: 166.
26
For a few examples see Van der Poel 2001: 68. Recent scholarship has examined funeral oratory in
particular, see e.g. Saulnier 1948 and McManamon 1989.
27 28
Melanchthon 1533, 1544, 1565, 1566–9. E.g. Muretus 1750; Muretus 1887.
278 marc van der poel
The typical subject of an academic inaugural address is the praise of the
arts and sciences. A fine example is Rudolph Agricola’s (1444–84) Oratio in
laudem philosophiae et reliquarum artium (‘Speech in praise of philosophy and
the rest of the arts’) from the year 1476, delivered in the presence of Duke
Ercole I of Ferrara, in whose service Agricola worked from 1475 until
1479.29 The following passage is a good illustration of Agricola’s elegant
attempts to match his style to the solemnity of the occasion and the
loftiness of his subject:
Si quis autem assit fortassis istarum rerum imperitior, quum ferri a me
tantis laudibus philosophiam audiat, ut haec sit praecipuum maximumque
eorum, quae a principe deo genus accepit humanum, utque hac ipsa duce
homines proxime deum accedant, ipsam pulcherrimo virtutum agmine
comitatam pectora nostra implere sui amore, alia omnia sperni, relinqui
solamque sincero constantique gaudio nostra desideria cumulare, postremo
ipsam esse, quae inter tantam turbam accidentium humanorum et sine
metu nos faciat tutos et sine periculo securos, si quis, inquam, imperitior
audiat haec, nonne me iure interroget atque dicat: “quae est ergo haec tam
clara tibi et laudata philosophia, quod ipsius officium, quid pollicetur?”30
Suppose that someone in the audience who is ill informed about these
matters hears that I praise philosophy so highly, that it is the most
important and greatest of all things received by mankind from God the
Creator and that by means of it human beings come closest to God,
suppose this person hears that philosophy, accompanied by the magnificent
throng of virtues, fills our hearts with love for Him, that everything else is
spurned and left behind, that philosophy alone satisfies our desires with
pure and lasting joy, and finally that it is again philosophy which, amidst
the endless turmoil of events in human life, makes us live safely without
fear and secure without risk suppose, I repeat, that someone who is ill
informed hears all this, would he not justly interrogate me and say: “what
then is this thing philosophy, so magnificent in your eyes and praiseworthy,
what is its task, what does it hold in store?”

After a detailed praise of philosophy as the highest pursuit for human

beings in the first part of the speech, this passage contains the transition to
the brief discussion of the various parts of philosophy in the second part of
the speech. One notes especially the complex but well-balanced first
sentence, in which the central notion philosophia is repeated twice by haec
followed by ipsa, sola, ipsa. Numerous other repetitions add to the dignity

29
A modern edition of the full text in Rupprich 1935; partial edition with translation in Van der Poel
1997a.
30
Rupprich 1935: 172.
 Oratory and Declamation 279
and grandiloquence of the passage: Si quis . . . Si quis inquam, the poly-
sendetic et sine metu . . . et sine periculo, interroget atque dicat, the tricolon
quae est . . . philosophia, quod (est) ipsius officium, quid pollicetur? The
passage is markedly formal in its structure and rhetorical techniques.
One of Agricola’s sixteenth-century biographers, Goswinus van Halen,
records that the Italians, having heard Agricola’s speech, were filled with
admiration, and when they heard that Agricola was a Frisian, reproached
themselves that this foreigner from an uncivilized country had purer Latin
than any native Italian.31
An example of a completely different kind of opening lecture is the
speech delivered by Lorenzo Valla (1407–57) twenty-one years earlier at the
opening of the academic year in Rome (1455).32 Unlike Agricola, Valla was
at this time a well-known scholar and author of many famous, and in part
very controversial, works.33 The theme of Valla’s speech is somewhat
unexpected, as he indicates himself in the introduction, because it praises
the Latin language instead of the arts and sciences; the style is equally
unexpected, because it is compact and direct rather than verbose and
circumstantial. Instead of a standard praise of arts and sciences, the speech
offers a description of the function of Latin as an agent of civilization both
in the Roman Empire and in Europe since antiquity. This argument leads
to the hailing of the papal court as the current centre of civilization, to
which all scholars and artists feel attracted. The ending of the speech is
quite remarkable, because Valla compliments the new pope, who was not
known to be a generous patron of scholarship and the arts, on his decision
to raise the salaries of the university professors. To illustrate the difference
in style from Agricola’s praise of philosophy, here is the beginning of
Valla’s brief discussion of the role of the Vatican as the guardian of
civilization in Europe. Whereas Agricola’s style is florid if not wordy,
Valla’s is very succinct. A simple sentence in the form of a brief question
is followed by a series of longer sentences with a simple structure and
unsophisticated syntax; the style is colloquial and pleasant, but plain:34
Quod cur in Europa non contingit? Nempe, ut reddam quod tertium est
quod initio promisi, quia id fieri sedes apostolica prohibuit. Cuius rei sine
dubio caput et causa extitit religio christiana. Cum enim utrunque

31
Akkerman 2012: 88–9 and 210.
32
Text, translation and detailed studies of the linguistic, literary and historical context in Valla 1994.
33
For example, his speech of 1444 denouncing the Donation of Constantine as a forgery and criticizing
the papacy, the Oratio or Declamatio De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione. See Valla
2007.
34
See Campanelli’s analysis of the language and style of the speech in Valla 1994: 87–107.
280 marc van der poel
testamentum extaret scriptum latinis litteris, quas deus in cruce una cum
grecis et hebraicis consecravit, cumque tot hominum clarissimorum ingenia
in illis exponendis consumpta essent, nimirum hi qui christiani censebantur
nomine, quanquam imperium romanum repudiassent, tamen nefas puta
verunt repudiare linguam romanam, ne suam religionem profanarent;
quorum presertim tot milia erant cum sacerdotum tum aliorum clericorum,
quos omnes necesse esse litteratos, apud quos videmus maiori in usu esse
linguam latinam quam apud principes seculares, quorum etiam iudicia
litterate duntaxat exercentur.35
And why does this (i.e. the falling into disuse of Latin) not happen in Europe?
Well and this is the third point I promised at the beginning because the
Holy See has prevented it from happening. The first and foremost cause of
this is without doubt the Christian faith. For it was evidently because both
Testaments existed in the Latin language, which God consecrated on the
cross together with Greek and Hebrew, and because so many of the brightest
men had spent their intellectual strengths in explaining them, that the people
who considered themselves Christians, although they had rejected the Roman
Empire, considered it a sacrilege to reject the language of the Romans, lest
they befouled their religion. There were in particular many thousands of
priests and other clerics, who all had to be educated, amidst whom we see the
Latin language in stronger use than among the secular princes, whose legal
procedures are conducted at least in written form (i.e. in Latin).

In the rest of Europe it was also customary to deliver speeches at the

beginning of the academic year or of a lecture series on a theme or a
particular author. This centuries-old tradition was made stronger by the
culture of public speaking that became particularly prominent in the
second half of the sixteenth century, as we have discussed briefly above.
Among the huge number of speeches published in this period, many
remain available only in early modern editions.36 A far smaller number
of speeches have been made easily accessible by means of modern editions
or translations. An example of the latter is a volume edited by Sachiko
Kusukawa containing an English translation by Christine F. Salazar of a
selection of Melanchthon’s academic orations.37
One may assume that academic speeches contained for the most part
purely standard discussions of the scholarly subjects mentioned in the title

35
Valla 1994: 198–200.
36
For locating such editions, printed catalogues such as the British Library General Catalogue of
Printed Books to 1975 or the National Union Catalog of Pre-1956 Imprints remain invaluable and
should be consulted alongside digital search engines and online resources.
37
Kusukawa and Salazar 1999. Unfortunately this edition does not print the Latin text, which must be
consulted separately (see Melanchthon 1961, Melanchthon 1842–4, or in one of the many early
modern editions).
 Oratory and Declamation 281
of the speech. Yet this was not always the case. Katharina Graupe’s recent
analysis of eighty speeches delivered by scholars in the Republic of
the Seven United Netherlands in the period of the conflict between the
Republic and Spain (1566–1648/9) has shown that academic speeches could
contain, under the guise of a mainstream scholarly subject (e.g. the
historical works of Tacitus), observations on the political situation of the
moment.38 Although speeches of this sort are formally epideictic, their
content brings them close to the deliberative genre, thus illustrating the
blurring and shifting of the classical boundaries we have already noted.

Cornelius Agrippa’s Collection of Ten Speeches

It might seem reasonable to suppose that most epideictic orations followed
the classical rules concerning the form of the speech and the presentation
of the subject matter, and that they therefore show little variation. The
small collection of ten orations written by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa of
Nettesheim (1486–1535), published in the year of his death by the Cologne
printer Johannes Soter, illustrates that this is not necessarily the case.39 It is
unknown who prepared this collection for publication, but it may have
been meant to assert Agrippa’s place in the world of humanists, since his
life’s work, De occulta philosophia (‘On Occult Philosophy’, 1533) had been
attacked for heresy by the Inquisitor of Cologne. The funeral oration
which Agrippa wrote for Margaret of Austria (Oration 10) illustrates that
Agrippa was indeed capable of writing a fully fledged humanist oration in a
very polished style.40 Yet this funeral oration is the only one in this
markedly varied collection which, by its long-windedness and its exuberant
praise of the deceased, answers to our expectation of a typical demonstra-
tive speech. The collection includes two academic speeches (Orations
1 and 2), dating from Agrippa’s Italian period (1511–18), which are similar
in kind to the funeral oration, although they are much shorter. They deal
very thoroughly with difficult philosophical subject matter (Plato’s
Symposium and Marsilio Ficino’s Latin translation of fourteen Hermetic
texts respectively), but are nevertheless written engagingly and in a pur-
posefully elegant style. The oration on justice and injustice in canon
and civil law delivered to an audience of clerics and distinguished men
(colendissimi patres ornatissimique viri, Oration 3) for a person taking his
doctorate, is a shorter and less ceremonious oration. Its most striking

38
Graupe 2012. 39
Agrippa 1535: Aiir-Gir; Agrippa 1970: 2.1074–1149.
40
On Agrippa as orator, see Van der Poel 1997a.
282 marc van der poel
feature is that it contains a large number of direct quotations from
authoritative sources in civil and canon law, especially in the section
dealing with injustice; one wonders how Agrippa read out all these
citations without impairing the fluency of his delivery. The speech ends
rather surprisingly with a brief admonition to judges and to all those who
wish to be called connoisseurs of civil and canon law that they should abide
by the laws themselves rather than teach others to do so, and to show the
public, by profession and practice, the rules of law and good living, rather
than punish the foolish too severely.
The four orations delivered by Agrippa as legal adviser and ambassador
(advocatus et orator) for the city of Metz (1518–20) are by contrast quite
unlike typical demonstrative orations, casual and rather unsophisticated
texts (Orations 4–7). The first of this series, Agrippa’s acceptance speech of
the honourable post, was delivered extemporaneously; it is the longest
of the four Metz orations, but, with a length of almost three and half pages
in the Opera-edition it is only one-tenth of the size of the funerary speech
for Margaret of Austria. There are also two very brief welcome speeches on
behalf of the city of Metz for a certain prince-bishop and a prominent lord,
and finally a short speech on some business concerning taxes delivered to
the Council of Luxemburg, which was then under Habsburg rule. The
attractiveness of these speeches lies not in their literary quality, but in the
fact that they seem to give the reader a glimpse of the daily business of an
administrative position of this sort, and of the function of Latin as the
language of official communication.41
Agrippa’s collection of orations shows the rich variety one may encoun-
ter when one sets out to acquaint oneself with Renaissance epideictic
orations written to be delivered. It shows that such orations are not
necessarily just model orations written in accordance with the classical
literary standards, but that their style may in fact vary considerably.
Agrippa’s orations also show that reading and understanding such speeches
may present a challenge to the reader inasmuch as the text may contain
references to things or situations which are unknown or difficult to find
additional information about. This is a problem to which we will return
briefly in section 4.

41
Orations 8 and 9 are very brief formal addresses, one delivered in Paris by a relative of Agrippa, who
was a Carmelite and baccalaureus in theology, on his acceptance of the rule of a community of friars;
the other, a welcome speech for Charles V, deivered immediately after the death of Margaret of
Austria (1530), on behalf of the son of the then former King of Denmark, Norway and Sweden,
Christian II.
 Oratory and Declamation 283

Speeches and Declamations Written to be Read Only

We now turn to a completely different group of texts, that is, orations and
declamations intended to be read only. This category of orations and
declamations were not written for delivery at a ceremony of some kind,
and they can best be characterized as texts in which the author formulates
his ideas on the subject matter at hand in an assertive manner, with the
purpose of convincing the reader. This is a very heterogeneous group of
texts, and one may well wonder what if any unity is to be found between
them. Two considerations may help us to accept these texts, in spite of all
their differences, as belonging to a specific class of Renaissance writing.
One concerns the genus to which they belong, the other the ideological
stance that their authors seem to share.
None of the speeches or declamations were written to be delivered – in
other words, they do not obviously belong to the epideictic genre.
However, as we have already seen, the two other classical branches of
oratory (the judicial and the deliberative) could not be used as they were
in antiquity, because in the Renaissance formal speeches were not
delivered as part of the system of administering justice or political debate.
Therefore, the range of these two branches was adapted to the new
historical context. Melanchthon, for instance, explained in his Elementa
rhetorices (‘Elements of Rhetoric’, 1531) that adolescents must be taught
the principles of judicial oratory in order to discuss disagreements in
letters, and to be able to administer Church affairs, since these have a
great resemblance to forensic disputes.42 In De conscribendis epistolis (‘On
Writing Letters’, 1522), Erasmus defined several classes of letters in the
juridical field, that is, accusatory letters, letters of complaint, apology,
justification, reproof, invective and entreaty.43 The deliberative genre was
likewise adapted to fit the contemporary historical context. Thus, Eras-
mus explains that letters of conciliation, reconciliation, encouragement,
discouragement, persuasion, dissuasion, consolation, petition, recommen-
dation, admonition and the amatory letter are usually considered as
examples of deliberative writing.44 Melanchthon also mentions some of
these functions as the proper domain of the deliberative genre, where the
goal is not simply knowledge, but some form of action in addition to
knowledge (ubi finis est non cognitio, sed praeter cognitionem actio ali-
qua).45 Another example of how the deliberative genre was adapted to

42 43
Melanchthon 2001: 60. Erasmus 1971: 516–41; Erasmus 1985: 207–25.
44 45
Erasmus 1971: 311; Erasmus 1985: 71. Melanchthon 2001: 118.
284 marc van der poel
modern needs is found in the work of Juan Luis Vives (1493–1540). In De
consultatione (1523), he extended the classical boundaries of the delibera-
tive genre almost indefinitely by stating: ‘we deliberate about everything
within our power, about the works of our hands [with a reference to
Isaiah 45:11] and the deeds of our mind’.46 These kinds of innovative
adaptations of classical theory allow us to consider orations and declam-
ations written only to be read to belong, nevertheless, to the sphere of
deliberative or judicial oratory.
There is a second reason why one might reasonably view orations and
declamations written only to be read as a coherent group: namely, that
their authors appear to share a common notion that eloquence not only
displays one’s intellectual sharpness and literary talent, but also represents a
commitment to the values of the res publica Christiana, and a willingness
to demand freedom to express ideas necessary to maintain those values.47
Lorenzo Valla expressed this commitment briefly and clearly at the begin-
ning of his refutation of the validity of the Donation of Constantine,
where he claimed that an orator is only worthy of that title when he not
only knows how to speak well, but also dares to speak up: Neque enim is
verus orator est habendus, qui bene scit dicere, nisi et dicere audeat.48 When
Valla wrote the pamphlet, he was in the service of King Alfonso of Aragon,
who was involved in a territorial conflict with the Papal States. The treatise
contains a brief address to the princes of his own time, three fictive
speeches by Constantine’s family members, the senate and the people of
Rome, and finally a passionate appeal to the pope to give up his claim to
worldly power and concentrate on spiritual leadership. One may debate
the degree to which opportunistic motives played a role in the composition
of the treatise, but Valla’s own statements and the rhetorical force of his
text leave no doubt that he claimed for himself the freedom to voice
his controversial opinion about the pope’s policies in the interests of
Christianity at large.
A number of declamations by Erasmus, most notably a letter in favour
of matrimony, first published as Encomium matrimonii (‘Praise of Mar-
riage’, 1518),49 and four declamations by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa of

46 47
Vives 1782: 242. See also Van der Poel 2007: 129–31.
48
Valla 1976: 57. Valla strongly opposed the use of the Donation during the Council of Ferrara and
Florence (1438–9) to assert the authority of the pope, and his treatise is as much a political
intervention against the Church’s claim to worldly power as it is a philological treatise.
49
Erasmus 1971: 400–29 and Erasmus 1985: 129–45; for a separate edition see Erasmus 1975 and
Erasmus 2015.
 Oratory and Declamation 285
Nettesheim constitute a group of treatises labelled declamatio which came
under attack from conservative scholastic theologians.50 The declamations
are prime examples of humanist texts which roused vigorous debate and
thus helped define the intellectual legacy of the early sixteenth-century
humanists.51 Erasmus’ letter in favour of matrimony differs from Agrippa’s
declamations in that Erasmus presents a fictitious case involving circum-
stances of persons, place and time, in other words, a hypothesis, whereas
Agrippa’s declamations are straightforward theseis without these circum-
stantiae. But the works share a discussion of matters of faith and morality
which were usually treated only by theologians. Confronted with attacks
by conservative theologians, they both claimed the freedom to present
their views about subjects on which scripture does not make conclusive
and authoritative statements, and about which the Church has not yet
made a definitive pronouncement in the form of dogma, confirmed by
universal consensus. This strategy is rooted in the ancient technique of
arguing in utramque partem (‘on both sides’) about subjects concerning
which the truth is not known. I have discussed in detail elsewhere how
Agrippa and Erasmus used this ancient method of arguing in their dec-
lamations in order to create a space in which they could state their moral
and religious views independently from the conservative theologians whose
ideas they rejected.52
Erasmus withstood attacks against his declamation on the praise of
marriage for fourteen years. His other declamations on moral, pedagogical
and political subjects, such as the Querela pacis (‘Complaint of Peace’,
1517), De pueris statim ac liberaliter instituendis declamatio (‘Declamation
on the Education in the Liberal Arts from Early Childhood Onward’,
1529), and the other writings which he considered to belong to the genre of
declamation,53 did not encounter such heavy opposition, but they too
show how Erasmus fulfilled his commitment to the commonwealth of
Christians by using rhetorical forms of reasoning and stylistic devices to
express frankly his opinions on important matters. His ‘Praise of Folly’

50
De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum et artium, atque excellentia verbi Dei declamatio (‘On the
Uncertainty and Vanity of the Arts and Sciences, and the Pre-eminent Declamation of God’s
Word’, 1530); De nobilitate et praecellentia foeminei sexus (‘On the Nobility and Pre-eminence of the
Female Sex’, 1529); De sacramento matrimonii (‘On the Sacrament of Marriage’, 1526); De originali
peccato disputabilis opinionis declamatio (‘A Speech on a Debatable Opinion concerning Original
Sin’, 1529).
51
See for a good introduction to these disputes Rummel 1995.
52
Van der Poel 1997b (especially chapters 3–5) and Van der Poel 2005a.
53
Erasmus lists and discusses all his declamations and writings belonging to the ‘declamatorium genus’
in his letter to Botzheim from 30 January 1523 (Erasmus 1906: 18–19).
286 marc van der poel
(Encomium moriae or Laus stultitiae) is probably the best manifestation of
the freedom claimed by the declaimer and his rhetorical strategies involv-
ing argument and style.54

Reading Orations and Declamations

In contrast with Classical Studies, the field of Neo-Latin Studies lacks
the strong philological tradition of detailed linguistic and historical
commentaries on literary and other kinds of texts. A great majority of
the orations and declamations we have mentioned or discussed above are
not available in editions that provide a reliable text and a thorough
philological study of the author, the genre and the historical context in
which the text was produced and received. This is an important reason
why reading and interpreting Latin texts from the Renaissance remains
largely pioneering work, requiring not only excellent knowledge of the
Latin language and literature of all periods up to the Renaissance, but
also knowledge about the times and historical circumstances in which
these texts were written, and ability to deal with the typographical
idiosyncracies (spelling, punctuation etc.) of early modern editions. In
fact, given the present state of scholarship, the varied and often difficult
texts discussed in the present chapter usually require readers who com-
mand all the philological skills needed to conduct the fundamental
research necessary to explicate them. In the context of this volume it is
particularly appropriate to dwell a moment on the complexity of the
Latin of the orations and declamations.
Latin orations and declamations from the Renaissance may vary quite
strongly in language and style. This is due to several factors. First, style is
above all a question of personal taste. There was a lively debate in the
Renaissance about the doctrine of imitatio. Although there certainly were
purists who strictly followed a given model, for example Cicero or
Apuleius, or who affected extreme brevity after the fashion of Lipsius,
most authors advocated and wrote polished yet functional Latin.55 This
practice usually resulted in a sensible adherence to the classical rules of the

54
The ‘Praise of Folly’ belongs to the genre of the paradoxical encomium, which was widely used in
the Renaissance. Works of this kind focus upon unexpected subjects, that is, subjects considered to
be either bad or worthless; this very heterogeneous genre is discussed further in Chapter 20 of this
volume. See also Van der Poel 1996 and 2001.
55
The literature on style and imitation in the Renaissance is vast; a good place to start is IJsewijn and
Sacré 1998: 412–19. See also Chapter 14 in this volume. Hallbauer 1726 prints a series of fifteenth-
and sixteenth-century treatises on imitatio as well as a very informative introduction.
 Oratory and Declamation 287
virtues of style (virtutes dicendi) formulated in rhetoric: (1) correctness
(latinitas), (2) lucidity (perspicuitas), (3) ornament (ornatus), (4) propriety
(decorum).56 Thus, an epideictic oration written for a very solemn occasion
will be written in a more grandiose style than an epideictic oration written
for a ceremony of lesser importance: Agrippa’s funeral oration for Margaret
of Austria may serve as an example of the former, and one of the orations
from his period in Metz of the latter.
It is also important to keep in mind a linguistic factor, that is, that the
humanists stood in a living tradition of using Latin for scholarly and
literary purposes. Thus, many medieval texts continued to be used, such
as Alexander of Villa Dei’s Doctrinale, which Erasmus, for instance,
considered a wholly acceptable handbook.57 Also, the ideological con-
frontation between the scholastics and the early sixteenth-century
humanists obscures the fact that the scholastic method continued to be
employed in Renaissance universities until the end of the sixteenth
century.58 Thus, medieval Latin was not completely superseded, and
many medieval words and constructions continued to be used as a matter
of course. Also, since Latin was a living language, the humanists coined
many new words by means of suffixes, prefixes etc. for things in their
environment which did not exist in earlier times.59 Nor did the human-
ists use a limited canon of classical authors such as was adopted in the
nineteenth century, when only the authors of the so-called ‘Golden Age’
of Latin literature were deemed worthy of being read; rather, they moved
around unrestrictedly in the entire surviving body of Latin literature,
including texts from all periods and all strata, from old comedy in the
third century bce up to and including the patristic texts produced at the
very end of antiquity. Finally, the humanists did not have at their disposal
dictionaries of purely classical Latin and detailed grammars in which the
usages of the classical authors were forced into strict rules of syntax. Such
works are the product of the nineteenth-century Altertumswissenschaft,
and although the humanists did in fact contribute substantial materials on
which the later classicists could build, such as Valla’s Elegantiae and
Ambrogio da Calepio’s Latin dictionary (Dictionarium), their own ideas
about the language and its functions would never have resulted in hand-
books enforcing the rules of grammar as strictly as those of the nineeenth-
century classicists.60

56 57
See also IJsewijn and Sacré 1998: 377–80. Ford 2000: 162–3.
58 59
See e.g. Nuchelmans 1980. See, e.g., the recapitulative appendices in Hoven 2006.
60
See also IJsewijn and Sacré 1998: 410–11.
288 marc van der poel
All in all, the characteristics of Renaissance Latin and the humanists’
comprehensive approach to Latin language and literature make high
demands of the readers of their texts. First of all, one must have good
knowledge of ancient Latin in all its varieties (archaic, classical, vulgar,
patristic Latin), and be able to use the relevant dictionaries, grammar
books, linguistic studies, etc. Yet one must also be open to the various
forms of Medieval Latin and be able to use the numerous dictionaries
necessary to read texts from this period. Finally, one must be aware of the
numerous but sometimes hard to find studies on the language and style
of individual Renaissance authors. There exists an online bibliographical
aid to find many of these studies,61 but a critical and comprehensive
study of them as a first step towards a syntax of humanistic Latin is still
very much a desideratum.

F U R T H E R RE A D IN G
The number of Latin speeches and declamations from the Renaissance available in
recent scholarly editions is very limited, so the frequent use of early modern
editions is unavoidable. The bibliographical search for recent editions is not easy,
since many lie hidden in journals or collections of essays (e.g. Agricola’s orations
in Bertalot 1928, Spitz Benjamin 1963, Mack 2000, Sottili 1997, Van der Laan
2003 and 2009, Walter 2004). Hence, thorough bibliographical research is an
indispensable first step in reading Renaissance Latin speeches and declamations.
For recent editions and studies, the Instrumentum Bibliographicum Neolatinum
published yearly in Humanistica Lovaniensia is a mine of information. A few
examples of separate editions of orations or declamations are Müllner 1899
(repr. 1970), Bembo 2003, Dolet 1992, Dorpius 1986, Poliziano 1986 and 2007,
Scaliger 1999, Vives 1989 2012, Valla 1994, Valla 2007. Scott 1910 (repr. 1991) and
Dellaneva and Duvick 2007 (in addition to Hallbauer 1726) offer a good access to
the principal Renaissance source texts on imitation and style. For a critical
evaluation of Renaissance Latin prose style Norden 1958: 732 809 is still a good
starting point. For a history of Renaissance rhetoric see Mack 2011 and for a brief
survey of both the theory and practice of eloquence during the Renaissance
Van der Poel 2015.

61
The ‘Bibliographical Aid to the Study of Renaissance Latin Texts’ (http://mvdpoel.ruhosting.nl/
Bibliographical%20Aid.htm).
 chapter 17

Dialogue
Virginia Cox

Dialogue was one of the most significant ancient literary genres renewed
by the humanists of early modern Europe, ‘a fundamental part not only of
neo-Latin literature but of early modern culture in general’.1 Many of the
most influential thinkers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries adopted
this form in their writings: in Italy, we have important dialogues by
Leonardo Bruni, Poggio Bracciolini, Lorenzo Valla, Leon Battista Alberti,
Giovanni Pontano; north of the Alps, by Desiderius Erasmus, Thomas
More, Ulrich von Hutten, Justus Lipsius and Jean Bodin. Originating
in Latin, dialogue migrated fairly early into humanistically inflected ver-
nacular literary culture, with Alberti composing his Della famiglia (‘On
the Family’) as early as 1433–4. The two traditions developed in parallel
thereafter, with Latin dialogues frequently translated into the vernacular
and vernacular dialogues more occasionally into Latin. A famous example
of the latter is Galileo Galilei’s ‘Dialogue on the Two World Systems’
(1632), translated by Matthias Bernegger in 1635 at Galileo’s urging; it was
mainly through Bernegger’s Systema cosmicum (‘Cosmic System’) that
Galileo’s great work, banned from circulation in the Italian original, first
reached the European intellectual world.
When we speak of Renaissance humanists reviving the dialogue form,
we should be careful not to imply that it had ceased to exist between
classical antiquity and the fifteenth century. A medieval tradition of
dialogue can certainly be identified, including some works of notable
interest, such as Peter Abelard’s Collationes (‘Debates’, or ‘Comparisons’)
or the dialogues of Ramon Llull.2 What was new from the fifteenth
century was a sustained engagement with the classical tradition of dialogue,
made possible in part through the renewal of the study of Greek, which

1
IJsewijn and Sacré 1998: 234.
2
On the two meanings of Abelard’s title, see Abelard 2001: xxiii. For an overview of medieval dialogue
production, see Jacobi 1999.

289
290 virginia cox
made the dialogues of Plato, Xenophon, Lucian and Plutarch available as
models for the first time. While it has sometimes been argued that the
explosion of dialogue writing we see from the fifteenth century reflects the
open and questing attitude characteristic of the Renaissance, by contrast
with the supposedly ‘monological’, dogmatic character of medieval intel-
lectual culture, this seems overly schematic, and rooted in nineteenth-
century historiographical models. Medieval culture was hardly lacking in
disputational impulses; it merely conducted its dialogues differently.
A sufficient explanation of the new attraction of the dialogue form seems
to be offered by humanism’s intense immersion in classical literature and
the centrality of imitatio in its compositional practices – although it may
also be true that Renaissance Christianity’s prolonged dialogue with the
classical pagan Other lent a special appeal to a literary form geared to the
dramatization of contrasting views.

Typologies
One problem in studying literary dialogue as a genre is the extraordinary
formal and thematic variety of the works that may be grouped under this
heading. While all dialogues dramatize exchanges between two or more
voices, the character of the speakers can vary immensely, from classical
gods and heroes, to talking animals, to invented human figures intended to
typify different positions, to clearly identifiable historical personages who
bring their own extra-dialogical ethos to the text. The relationship between
the speakers may vary from one of straight didacticism, with an authorita-
tive figure imparting wisdom to a ‘pupil’, to one of a genuine conflict of
ideas. The subject matter of early modern dialogues is equally varied. In
addition to the kind of philosophical topics we might expect from the
precedents of Plato and Cicero, we have dialogues from this period on
subjects ranging from the the causes of the Nile’s annual flood to mining
practices, the properties of balsam, the correct orthography of English, and
the miserable fates suffered by literary men.3 This is only to speak of the
serious tradition of dialogue, moreover, without touching on the comic
tradition, which features works such as the famous satirical Julius exclusus
(‘Julius Shut out of Heaven’, 1513–14), often attributed to Erasmus, in
which the recently deceased Pope Julius II is interrogated by St Peter and
refused entry to Heaven, much to his spluttering ire.

3
The dialogues referred to are Nogarola 1552; Agricola 1530; Alpino 1591; Smith 1568; Gaisser 1999
(Valeriano).
 Dialogue 291
Modern analysts of dialogue have introduced various categorizations
that can help maintain some order in the face of this bewildering multipli-
city. One useful division, proposed by David Marsh in his 1980 book, The
Quattrocento Dialogue, rests simply on the classical models most current in
the period. Marsh delineates four models of dialogue, while acknowledging
that the four cross-fertilize in practice. One is Platonic dialogue, character-
ized by a dramatic, rather than a narrative, presentation, and by the
peculiar, probative manner of questioning Plato attributes to Socrates
in his dialogues. Another is Ciceronian dialogue, typically narrative and
showcasing the rhetorical exercise of argument in utramque partem (on
both sides of an issue). A third is the Lucianic dialogue: dramatic,
fantastic, comic, characteristically using invented speakers, rather than
historically identifiable ones; while a fourth is the convivial or symposiac
dialogue, based on texts such as Xenophon’s Symposium (‘The Banquet’)
or Macrobius’ Saturnalia (‘The Festival of Saturn’), which portray leis-
urely, often meandering after-dinner conversations among erudite men.
Marsh identifies fifteenth-century Italian dialogues corresponding to
each type, although he emphasizes the dominance of the Ciceronian
model. His analysis is valid for neo-Latin dialogue more generally,
although the sixteenth century saw Lucian’s influence spreading, espe-
cially north of the Alps.

‘Open’ vs. ‘Closed’ Dialogue

In addition to this model-based typology, subdivisions of the dialogue
genre may be essayed based on theme (religious; philosophical; literary;
scientific) or function (polemical; didactic; consolatory; satirical); on the
number of speakers (diphonic; polyphonic); or on the type of argumenta-
tion employed.4 Perhaps especially interesting, though not easy to capture,
are subdivisions based on the extent to which individual dialogues exploit
the possibilities of ambiguity and polyvocality to which the form seems
intrinsically to lend itself. Eva Kushner distinguishes in this regard between
‘dialogical’ and ‘monological’ dialogues, while I have used the largely
synonymous terms ‘open’ and ‘closed’.5 A monological or closed dialogue
is one in which a single perspective dominates, and speakers for alternative
viewpoints have the role of straw men. A clear-cut example is Aurelio
Lippo Brandolini’s De comparatione re publicae et regni (‘Republics

4
Smarr 2005: 25–7 has a useful summary of typologies of dialogue proposed by recent critics.
5
Cox 1992; Kushner 2004: 125–31.
292 virginia cox
and Kingdoms Compared’, 1489), in which Matthias Corvinus, king of
Hungary, defends monarchy as the best form of government against a
republican spokesman, Domenico Giugni, in a contest that the work’s
recent editor, James Hankins, has characterized as ‘conducted with mag-
nificent unfairness’.6 A dialogical, or open, dialogue, by contrast, gives
sufficient weight to more than one viewpoint for it to be a matter of
legitimate debate which of these viewpoints the author favored, and indeed
whether he favored one at all.
The dialogue form’s potential for openness is well illustrated if we look
at an example like Lapo da Castiglionchio’s De curiae commodis (‘On the
Benefits of the Curia’, 1438), a brilliant exercise in the genre, now begin-
ning to take its rightful place within the canon of fifteenth-century
humanistic dialogues. De commodis dramatizes a conversation between a
fictionalized version of the author, referred to as Lapus, and a friend,
Angelo da Recanati (‘Angelus’), who attempts to persuade Lapus to leave
the corruption of the papal court for a retired life of scholarly leisure. Lapus
resists this suggestion, partly because he cannot afford the luxury of
retirement, and partly on the grounds that the Curia is not the sink of
moral iniquity that Angelus claims, but rather a great and vibrant intellec-
tual and religious centre, uniquely conducive to the quest for spiritual
beatitude that is humanity’s true end.
On the surface of it, Lapus’ pro-curial position triumphs within De
commodis, and the work has been read in the past as effectively ‘mono-
logical’, especially in its ingenious defence of clerical wealth as justifiable
within a modern context, despite its apparent contradiction of New
Testament values.7 For what purports to be a defense of the Curia,
however, De commodis contains a remarkable quantity of material support-
ive of Angelus’ original criticisms of the court (it is difficult, for example, to
read Lapus’ lengthy disquisitions on the culinary and sexual pleasures on
offer in elite curial circles without suspecting ironic intent).8 De commodis
has the ‘Rorschach test’ quality of all truly open dialogues, in that it gives
scope for radically differing readings: evidence can be found in the text for
reading it as a defence of the Curia, an attack on the Curia, or, more
interestingly, something in between. The dialogue paints papal Rome as a
place of immense vitality and cosmopolitanism, simultaneously attractive
and repellent: a complex reality that the dialogue form, with its vocation
for ambiguity, is ideally well equipped to express.

6 7
Brandolini 2009: xix. On the reception history of the text, see Celenza 1999: 26–7.
8
Lapo in Celenza 1999: 178–90 (vii, 19–44); see also Celenza’s discussion at 66–71.
 Dialogue 293
While modern critics of the genre tend to have a preference for open-
ended, contentious, unresolved dialogues, there are dangers in over-
privileging this criterion of assessment. Not least, we risk anachronism,
for early modern readers appear not to have considered openness an
essential component of dialogue. Of the three main sixteenth-century
theorists of the dialogue form, all Italian, only one, Sperone Speroni,
emphasizes the ambiguity of dialogue as part of its attraction, while
another, Carlo Sigonio, presupposes a more closed model of dialogue,
with one character designated the princeps sermonis (‘leader of the conver-
sation’). The third theorist, Torquato Tasso, identifies as the key feature of
dialogue its combination of argument and mimesis, positioning the writer
of dialogue ‘mid-way between the dialectician and the poet’.9 Tasso’s
emphasis on mimesis can be useful in alerting us to virtues in the literary
dialogue that transcend the open/closed distinction, such as the vivacity
and naturalness of the exchanges, the character-painting (ethopoeia) of the
speakers, the charm of the setting, and even, occasionally, the historical
poignancy of the moment when the dialogue is set. Thus Pietro Bembo’s
De Aetna (On Etna, 1496), which could easily have been a mere erudite
travelogue, is given literary life through Bembo’s edgy representation of his
relationship with his father, the other speaker, while Paolo Giovio’s review
of contemporary Italian culture and mores in De viris et foeminis aetate
nostra florentibus (‘On Contemporary Men and Women’, 1528–9) gains
much depth from its setting, on the dream-like island of Ischia in the
aftermath of the cataclysmic Sack of Rome.10
A good example of a dialogue that succeeds ‘poetically’ while remaining
firmly didactic in terms of its distribution of roles is Justus Lipsius’ De
constantia (‘On Constancy’, 1584), one of the most popular neo-Latin
dialogues of this whole period. Lipsius’ dialogue is set during a time of
political turmoil in his native Netherlands, in the early 1570s, and he
portrays himself as speaker in a state of near-desperation, receiving solace
from his much older friend ‘Langius’ (Charles de Langhe), who consoles
him through Stoic wisdom. Langius is clearly the authoritative speaker
here – the princeps sermonis, to use Sigonio’s term – yet Lipsius’ choice of
the dialogue form, rather than a monological form such as the treatise, is
anything but inert. The setting is carefully realized and even thematically
incorporated at one point, when Langius’ rapturously described garden

9
(‘Quasi mezzo fra ’l poeta e ’l dialettico’; Tasso 1982: 32). For early modern dialogue theory, see
Snyder 1989.
10
For discussion of Giovio from this perspective see Enenkel 2010: 40–2.
294 virginia cox
becomes the subject of a debate on the correct use of the pleasures offered by
such loci amoeni.11 Ethopoeia is also a feature of the dialogue, with the young
Lipsius, in particular, a sharply characterized figure: questing, sceptical,
sometimes touchy, constantly testing Langius’ Stoic wisdom against lived
experience. The dialogue’s dynamics are reminiscent at points of Petrarch’s
remarkable Secretum (‘The Secret’), of the 1340s, in which a figure named
Augustinus, ostensibly representing St Augustine, seeks to provide moral
succor to a figure named Franciscus, ostensibly a figure for the author. In
both the Secretum and De constantia, a princeps sermonis is clearly identifi-
able, yet the ‘minor’ speaker plays a key role in the development of the
dialogue’s argument, goading his interlocutor, contesting each point, never
allowing a thesis to escape untried. Both works have something of the
character of a dramatized psychic conflict, portraying an inner dialogue as
much as an outer: a quality pointed up in the true title of the Secretum: De
secreto conflictu curarum mearum (‘On the Secret Conflict of My Cares’).

Dialogue and Portraiture

Despite their thematic and structural consonance, Petrarch’s Secretum
and Lipsius’ De constantia are sharply differentiated in respect of their
mimetic texture, in a manner that reflects the transition between the
medieval and humanistic dialogue traditions. The Secretum is set in a
dream-space reminiscent of Boethius’ Consolatio philosophiae (‘The Con-
solation of Philosophy’), in which a fourth-century bishop may converse
with a fourteenth-century poet. De constantia, by contrast, adheres to the
norms of verisimilitude we find observed at least in a substantial propor-
tion of post-fourteenth-century dialogues; it portrays identifiable contem-
porary speakers engaged in a conversation we are invited to imagine as
having actually taken place. This element of portraiture constituted one of
the great appeals of dialogue as a genre within humanism: in addition to
their substantive element, historical or ‘documentary’ dialogues of this
kind sought to capture the affect and mores of particular erudite circles,
while at the same time modeling ideals of friendship and urbane conversa-
tion close to the heart of the humanist Republic of Letters.12
Exemplary cases of such portrait-dialogues are found within Marsh’s
category of convivial or symposiac dialogues, of which a distinguished
example is Angelo Decembrio’s vast, seven-book De politia litteraria

11
On the garden in Lipsius, see Swan 2005: 115–18.
12
On dialogue and friendship, see Vallée 2004. On the poetics of the ‘documentary’ dialogue, see Cox
1992: 42–4.
 Dialogue 295

Figure 17.1: Hans Burgkmair the Elder, woodcut from frontispiece of

Politiae literariae Angeli Decembrii Mediolanensis oratoris clarissimi, ad summum
pontificem Pium II, libri septem (Augsburg: Heinrich Steiner, 1540), showing a group of six
humanists in conversation, labeled as (from left) Guarinus [Guarino of Verona], Vegius [Maffeo
Vegio], Decembrius [Angelo Decembrio], Arentinus [presumably Leonardo Bruni Aretino], Poggius
[Poggio Bracciolini], and Gualengus [Giovanni Gualengo]. The image first appeared in a medical text,
Alsaharavius [Al-Zahrawi], Liber theoricae nec non praticae (Augsburg: Grimm and Wirsung, 1519).

(‘On Literary Polish’, 1463), an erudite miscellany on the model of Aulus

Gellius’ Attic Nights, loosely structured around the theme of the perfect
library and what it should contain. The mimetic element is fundamental
to this work. The dialogue is set at Ferrara, under the rule of the
humanistically educated marquis Leonello d’Este, and it seeks to memor-
ialize the Ferrarese court as epitomizing the ‘literary polish’ of the title.
Leonello himself takes a prominent role in the dialogue, as does the
humanist Guarino of Verona, the great intellectual icon of the court.
Given De politia litteraria’s investment in portraiture, it is interesting to
note that its first printed edition (Augsburg 1540) contains as a frontis-
piece illustration a rare attempt at a visual evocation of humanistic
dialogue. The woodcut that prefaces the volume, repurposed from an
earlier medical work, shows six well-dressed men crowded around a table
in animated debate, labeled with the names of prominent Italian human-
ists and interlocutors from Decembrio’s dialogue, with the dominant
figures a spry, elderly ‘Guarinus’ and an imposing ‘Decembrius’ pointing
at a book lying open before him on the table (Figure 17.1). The detail of
the book, effectively made vocal by Decembrius’ gesture, is evocative in
296 virginia cox
context, alluding most obviously to the literary erudition that informs
the conversation, but perhaps also to the status of dialogues as ‘speaking
volumes’, attempts to conjure the effect of speech on the page.

Dialogues and Women

The conversation we see depicted in the Decembrio woodcut is all-male, as
are the vast majority of conversations portrayed in neo-Latin dialogues.
Where we encounter female voices within neo-Latin dialogue, it is most
frequently within the Erasmian tradition of fictive colloquia, which makes
effective use of women as speakers within debates that touch on gender-
conscious social issues such as marriage.13 Within the ‘documentary’
traditions, Ciceronian or symposiac, dialogues containing female inter-
locutors are much rarer, though a few interesting cases may be noted,
notably Martino Filetico’s intriguing Iocundissimae disputationes (‘Delight-
ful Disputations’, 1462), which is set at the court of Urbino and contains a
lively portrait of its young countess, Battista Sforza, and Ortensio Lando’s
Forcianae quaestiones (‘Debates at Forci’, 1535), which portrays a large and
festive mixed group of speakers in the villa of the wealthy Buonvisi family
at Forci, near Lucca, and features a lively discussion of the status of
women, with a woman as princeps sermonis. A few examples of female-
authored Latin dialogues also survive from the period, all with exclusively
female speakers. These comprise two short untitled diphonic dialogues on
ethical issues by the Italian reformist Olimpia Morata (d. 1555) and a more
substantial work by the Portuguese humanist Luisa Sigea (d. 1560), also
diphonic, on the relative merits of court and private life.14

Leonardo Bruni, Dialogi ad Petrum Paulum Histrum

The remainder of this chapter will be taken up by readings of two of
the most famous of neo-Latin dialogues: Leonardo Bruni’s Dialogues for
Pierpaolo Vergerio and Thomas More’s Utopia. Both these dialogues,
especially Utopia, are highly complex works, with extensive secondary
literature. My focus here will be on a sole aspect of these texts, their
exploitation of the dialogue form.

13
See Leushuis 2004. For the tradition of school colloquia generally see Deneire 2014d.
14
For brief discussion of Filetico’s and Lando’s dialogues, see Cox 2013: 58, 68. On Morata, see Smarr
2005: 71–81; on Sigea, George 2002. See also Allen 2002: 966–8, on a dialogue featuring the
fifteenth-century erudite Isotta Nogarola as speaker, and partly composed by her.
 Dialogue 297
Bruni’s Dialogi is of foundational importance in the history of literary
dialogue as the first post-classical dialogue to take a ‘documentary’, Cicero-
nian form. The dialogue is set in Florence, not long before the likely date of
composition, which critics now place at 1405–6.15 The discussions portrayed
take place across two days, and involve a small cast of speakers, all friends.
The eldest and most eminent is the chancellor and humanist Coluccio
Salutati (Colucius), in whose house the first day’s discussions take place.
With him are three younger men, Bruni himself (Leonardus) and the
patrician humanists Niccolò Niccoli (Nicolaus) and Roberto de’ Rossi
(Robertus). The latter is the host for the second day’s discussion, when a
fifth speaker, Petrus (Pietro di ser Mino da Montevarchi), joins the group.
The element of portraiture intrinsic to Ciceronian dialogue is present to
a marked extent in the Dialogi, especially in the sharply drawn figures of
Colucius and Nicolaus. The former is represented as grave, revered, faintly
ponderous, the quintessential elder statesman; the latter, as brilliant,
mercurial, provocative, a well-calculated foil to the older man. Bruni
underlines this ethopoeia in his dedication of the dialogue, to Pierpaolo
Vergerio, once part of Salutati’s circle in Florence, but now departed for
Padua. Bruni speaks fondly of how keenly Vergerio is missed,
. . . tunc tamen maxime cum aliquid illarum rerum agimus quibus tu, dum
aderas, delectari solebas: ut nuper, cum est apud Colucium disputatum,
non possem dicere quantopere ut adesses desideravimus. Motus profecto
fuisses tum re quae disputabatur, tum etiam personarum dignitate. Scis
enim Colucio neminem fere graviorem esse; Nicolaus vero, qui illi adver
sabatur, et in dicendo est promptus, et in laecessendo acerrimus (236)
. . . especially when we speak of those things you used to delight in when
you were with us, as happened the other day, when we were debating at
Coluccio’s and felt your absence very badly. For you would have been much
struck not only by the dignity of what was said but by the dignity of the
speakers for, as you know, no one is graver than Coluccio, and Niccolò,
his opponent, is fluent and extremely sharp in debate.
Bruni underlines here Vergerio’s intimacy with the group, which makes
him capable of conjuring its discussions in his imagination vividly through
memory – an important gesture, since it points to the dialogue’s ambition
to evoke these same discussions with equal enargeia for the reader. We are
reminded of Vergerio’s familiar eye at various later points in the narration,

15
See Bruni 1994: 61–4. All parenthetical page references in the text are to this edition. In the first
quotation (tunc tamen maxime. . .), rei has been corrected to re on the basis of the edition in Bruni
1996.
298 virginia cox
as when we see Salutati prepare to speak ‘with that expression he has when
he is about to engage seriously with a subject’, or respond to another
speaker’s diatribe ‘smiling, in that way he has’.16
Bruni’s description of Nicolaus in the passage just quoted as Colucius’
‘adversary’ captures the exuberantly contentious, though always amicable,
character of the dialogue. The principal issue on which the two men differ is a
key one for early Florentine humanism, of the relationship between the -
avant-garde classical learning it pursued with such enthusiasm and the
modern, Christian, civic culture of Florence.17 This was a question of
extreme topicality at the time of Bruni’s composition of the Dialogi, and
echoes of numerous contemporary polemics may be heard in the work,
perhaps most saliently a tetchy letter-exchange between Salutati and
Poggio Bracciolini, a younger contemporary of Bruni’s, regarding the relative
merits of the great classical Greek and Roman authors and modern Tuscan
writers such as Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, much beloved of the ver-
nacular readers of the day.18 Nicolaus, in the Dialogi, takes the position of
Bracciolini – and one that the historical Niccoli is known to have embraced –
arguing that modern culture is irremediably inferior to that of classical
antiquity; as he trenchantly puts it, he would happily exchange the complete
works of Dante or of Petrarch for a single letter of Cicero’s or a single poem of
Virgil’s.19 Bruni’s Colucius takes the more balanced position espoused by the
historical Salutati, that it is possible to revere antiquity and to strive to imitate
the classics without despising the literary products of the modern world.
Although the question of the relationship of classical and modern
literature is the primary theme of the Dialogi, a brilliantly exploited
secondary theme is dialogue itself, or ‘disputation’ in Colucius’ preferred
term. The first day’s conversation begins with a moment of awkward
silence, broken by a speech from Colucius reproaching his young friends
for not exerting themselves in the practice of disputation, which he extols
as the true means to knowledge. Nicolaus responds with a witty and
impassioned diatribe arguing for the impossibility in the modern world
of civilized debate as Cicero might have conceived it, given the miserable
levels of learning possible after the West’s millennium-long dark ages. The
best modernity can offer in place of the ‘ancient and true way of disputing

16
Bruni 1994: 237 (eo vultu quo solet cum quid paulo accuratius dicturus est); 258 (subridens, ut solet).
17
For a summary of the content of the Dialogi, see Quint 1985: 425–7. For discussions of the critical
tradition, see Quint 1985: 427–30 and Gilson 2005: 86–7.
18
Witt 2000: 392–402.
19
Bruni 1994: 258 (Ego mehercule unam Ciceronis epistolam atque unum Vergilii carmen omnibus vestris
opusculis longissime antepono).
 Dialogue 299
(vetus et vera disputandi via) – presumably the leisured style of rhetorical
argumentation attested in classical dialogue – is the jargon-ridden
jabbering of northern European scholastics such as ‘Farabrich, Buser,
Occam’, whose very names suggest their origins in the cohorts of Rhada-
manthus, the infernal judge.20 Nicolaus’ speech is greeted by stunned
silence from his listeners, followed by an acclamation from Colucius
(‘Never have you been so powerful a combatant, so weighty a disputant!’)21
As Colucius later underlines, Nicolaus has paradoxically undermined his
own argument through his learning and eloquence – for, hearing his ‘most
polished oration’, no one could possibly credit his claim that the art of
rhetorical disputation was dead.22
It is after this lively warm-up that the two disputants proceed to debate
the more controversial question of the status of the modern Italian poets.
Nicolaus first delivers a withering account of the failings of Dante, Petrarch
and Boccaccio; then, on the following day, prompted by Colucius’ protests,
he produces a palinodic speech praising them – a device imitated from
Cicero’s De oratore, where Antonius similarly reverses an earlier stated
position, claiming that he adopted it purely to stimulate debate. Much
scholarly discussion has surrounded the question of whether Nicolaus’
recantation is genuine, or simply a further witty rhetorical tour de force.
The related but separate question of where Bruni himself stands on the issue
has also provoked much debate, although the work seems expressly designed
to baffle any attempt to ascertain this. Teasingly, Bruni’s self-figure within
the dialogue, Leonardus, refuses to speak on the subject when pressed. As
David Quint has noted, however, we may at least be sure that Bruni did not
share the extreme cultural pessimism that he has Nicolaus express on the
first day.23 The Dialogi itself, like Bruni’s other great work of this time, his
Laudatio Florentinae urbis (‘Panegyric on the City of Florence’), which
imitates Aelius Aristides’ Panathenaic Oration, evinces a strong confidence
in the capacity of modern humanistic writing to revive the rhetorical and
literary traditions of the ancient world.
A further clue to Bruni’s perspective in the dialogue may perhaps be
identified in a telling detail in its scene-setting: his choice to locate the work
temporally at Easter, ‘when those days were being solemnly celebrated that
are held as feasts for the resurrection of Jesus Christ’.24 Although this

20
The figures referred to are Richard Ferrybridge, Willem Buser of Heusden and William of Ockham.
21
Bruni 1994: 249 (Ne tu . . . Nicolae, fuisti in resistendo tam fortis, in disserendo tam gravis!).
22 23
Bruni 1994: 250 (‘accuratissima[m] oratio[nem]’). Quint 1985: 443.
24
Bruni 1994: 236 (Cum solemniter celebrarentur ii dies qui pro resurrectione Iesu Christi festi habentur).
300 virginia cox
paschal allusion is clearly relevant to the dialogue’s themes, which turn on
the ‘death’ of classical culture and its possibilities for resurrection, there is
also a high degree of irony in this setting; we are invited to imagine
Salutati’s humanist circle cloistering itself to discuss literature and parade
its classical erudition on the very day when the greatest feast of the
Christian calendar is being celebrated outside. No time setting could better
dramatize the risk of cultural alienation and ivory-towerism implicit in the
project of humanism, if that project remained too firmly rooted in nostalgia
for pagan antiquity, and in a perception of modernity as characterized by
inevitable and terminal decline.
The subtlety of Bruni’s deployment of the detail of the Easter setting –
seemingly throwaway, but in fact crucial to our understanding of the
dialogue – is characteristic of his art in the Dialogi. Compared with many
writers of dialogue, Bruni is distinctly sparing in his use of descriptive
detail and action. When the speakers decamp to Robertus’ Oltrarno villa
on the second day, we might expect from another writer a lyric description
of a locus amoenus. With Bruni, we must content ourselves with a laconic
‘having crossed the Arno and arrived, we inspected the garden, and retired
to the loggia’.25
This minimalism is deceptive, however; as we saw in the case of the
allusion to Easter, Bruni works his few narrative details very hard. The
mention of the Arno crossing on the second day recalls a moment on
the first day when Colucius fondly recalls that, when visiting his mentor
Luigi Marsili, he would use his crossing of the river on the way to Marsili’s
house to mark the point when he must begin to marshal his thoughts for
their discussions (240). A further mention of Florence’s most famous
bridge, the Ponte Vecchio, is found in the last sentence of the text. This
subtle emphasis on Florence’s river and its crossings points to the crucial
metaphorical importance of bridges in the dialogue – bridges between
generations, bridges between eras and cultures, bridges between differing
views. Colucius himself is a bridge in a sense, between the generation of
Petrarch and that of a new generation, empowered by its advanced classical
learning, but in danger of arrogance in despising the foundations on which
its new edifice has been built.
Although Bruni produced no formal theory of dialogue and does not
discuss the form in any detail in his dedicatory letter to Vergerio, an
implicit reflection on the genre may be identified in the text itself, in

25
Bruni 1994: 259 (Arnum itaque transgressi, cum illum perventum esset inspectisque hortis, in
porticam . . . redissemus).
 Dialogue 301
Colucius’ initial paean to disputation. Much of what is said there of oral
disputation applies equally to written dialogue, especially the initial simile
Colucius chooses to illustrate the value of the art:
Nam quid est, per deos immortales, quod ad res subtiles cognoscendas atque
discutiendas plus valere possit quam disputatio, ubi rem in medio positam
velut oculi plures undique speculantur, ut in ea nihil sit quod subterfugere,
nihil quod latere, nihil quod valeat omnium frustrari intuitum? (237 8)
By the immortal gods, what is there more valuable than disputation in
helping us to grasp and examine difficult ideas? It is as if an object were
placed centre stage and observed by many eyes, so that no aspect of it can
escape them, or hide from them, or deceive the gaze of all.

This image of the scrutiny of an object by viewers arrayed in a circle is

valuable in capturing the dynamics of literary dialogue, which deploys
multiple viewpoints precisely to conduct this kind of intellectual inquiry
‘in the round’. Specifically, the notion of dialogue operating like an
inverted panopticon, with differently positioned eyes all trained on the
same object, is useful in capturing the dialogue’s intrinsically heuristic
character; just as the spectators’ differing angles of vision are determined by
their different physical positions vis-à-vis the viewed object, so the inter-
locutors’ viewing angles are shaped by their experience, education, circum-
stances, character and age. In the case of Colucius and Nicolaus, their
generational distance is crucial to us in decoding their differing positions,
as is the gulf between the two men’s professional status – Colucius the
responsible public servant and long-time ‘voice of Florence’ as chancellor
of the city, Nicolaus the wealthy amateur scholar and bibliophile, free to
indulge his contrarian instincts by pouring scorn on a civic icon like
Dante. The inverse-panoptic character of dialogue, its rejection of an
exclusive, ‘frontal’ perspective, also creates space for the reader, who is
effectively invited to join the scrutinizing circle. Bruni signals this tacitly in
his dedicatory letter when he positions Vergerio as an ‘absent presence’
in the text.

Thomas More, Utopia (1516)

If Bruni’s Dialogi may be read as an exercise in reformulating Ciceronian
dialogue to serve the ends of modern cultural debate, Thomas More’s
Utopia, written just over a century later, has a similar relationship to the
Lucianic tradition. More had translated four works of Lucian’s, including
two dialogues, around a decade before he wrote Utopia, and one of the
302 virginia cox
early editions of Utopia (Florence 1519) publishes the work alongside his
and Erasmus’ Lucianic translations. Lucianic elements in Utopia include
its mingling of realist with fantastic elements and its concerted deployment
of the device, or register, of serio ludere or ‘serious play’, the use of comic
means to explore serious truths.26 Like Bruni’s Dialogi, Utopia is markedly
open in character and defies any attempt to establish a stable authorial
position. Both authors insert themselves into their dialogue but relinquish
the role of princeps sermonis: where Bruni’s Leonardus declines to speak,
More’s Morus does enter into debate in the first book with the dominant
speaker, Raphael Hythloday, but it is far from clear that his prudent,
conservative persona may be identified straightforwardly with the
authorial voice.
As we have it now, More’s Utopia consists of two books, the second
almost entirely occupied by a speech of Hythloday’s describing the laws
and customs of the island of Utopia (‘Nowhere’), where he purports to
have lived for five years. The first, dialogical book introduces the romantic
figure of Hythloday, philosopher-adventurer and heir to Odysseus and
Plato, in conversation with two real-life figures, Morus himself and the
Antwerp humanist Pieter Gillis, to whom More dedicated the work. In a
technique familiar from Platonic dialogue, More embeds a number of
secondary, narrated dialogues within the dialogue of Book i: Hythloday
recounts a semi-comic conversation he had some years before at the table
of More’s old mentor, the cleric and humanist John Morton, and also
sketches out hypothetical conversations he might witness in the council of
the king of France and in another, unidentified royal council. Together
with the dazzling series of paratexts that preface the work (commendatory
letters and verse, maps of Utopia, a chart of the Utopian alphabet), the
intricately imbricated dialogues of Book i serve to emphasize the hall-of-
mirrors character of More’s ‘truly golden little book’.27 If Bruni’s Colucius
defines disputation, and hence dialogue, as a device for seeing things from
all angles, More carries this panoptical tendency within the genre to
virtuosic extremes.28
More’s close friend Erasmus remarked of the composition of Utopia
that it proceeded in two stages: More first wrote Book ii, presumably

26
On the Lucianic influence in Utopia, see Baker-Smith 2011: 142–4. Marsh 1988: 193–7, notes the
fusion of Ciceronian with Lucianic elements.
27
The description (libellus vere aureus) comes from the title-page of the 1516 Louvain edition. For the
paratexts or parerga, see More 1995: 4–39.
28
For discussions of Utopia in the context of dialogue, see Houston 2014, 15–40; also the essays of
Chordas, Vallée and Warner in Heitsch and Vallée 2004.
 Dialogue 303
together with the scene-setting first pages of Book i, and only later – and
in more haste - inserted the more substantive dialogue that occupies the
bulk of Book i.29 This detail is intriguing, and it is instructive to
reconstruct the first redaction of the work following Erasmus’ narration
and to consider how much the prefatory dialogue of Book i complicates
our reception of Hythloday’s subsequent lengthy speech. Book i’s discus-
sions introduce questions of political theory and practice of relevance to
Book ii’s description of Utopia, notably the key issue of private property
and wealth distribution. They also offer dystopian glimpses of contem-
porary English and European realities that serve tacitly as a point of
comparison during our reading of Book ii, and motivate More’s (or
Morus’) closing remark that Utopian society contains many features
rather to be hoped for than expected in the world he inhabits.30 Despite
these important substantive anticipations, however, perhaps the most
important role that Book i’s dialogue plays within the overall economy
of the work is to raise metapolitical and metarhetorical questions
concerning the ways in which we speak of politics, the contexts
and reception dynamics of political argument, and, crucially, the relation-
ship between speculative political and ethical thinking and concrete
political practice.
In classic dialogical style, Utopia raises these important issues not to
offer a resolution, but rather to illustrate their complexity. If Hythloday
and Morus represent two political types, the speculative, impassioned
idealist and the realist, we are given remarkably little guidance on which
of their perspectives is ‘right’. It is tempting to see the two as presenting
positions between which More, as author, was divided himself, and to
read Book i of Utopia, like Petrarch’s Secretum, as a ‘dialogue of the mind
with itself’.31 One effect of this irresolution, as in every open dialogue, is
that the reader is actively implicated in the process of truth-seeking.
In J. Christopher Warner’s words, the text’s complexity and ambiguities
‘challenge us to decide between the positions of Hythloday and Mor[us]
not once for all, but here and there . . . while at every stage we are also
urged to imagine alternative possibilities that would transcend the
wisdom of either speaker’.32 The dynamic Warner describes is well
captured in the dialogue theorist Sperone Speroni’s comparison of the

29
On the composition of Utopia, see Baker-Smith 2011: 148–9.
30
More 1995: 248 (ita facile confiteor permulta esse in Utopiensium republica quae in nostris civitatibus
optarim verius quam sperarim).
31 32
The phrase is from Bevington 1961: 497. Warner 2004: 63.
304 virginia cox
dialogue to a tinderbox, in which the speakers’ views, as they clash, act as
the flint and the firesteel, striking off sparks of truth to be kindled in the
receptive reader’s mind.33
Hythloday’s and Morus’ richest debate is that which concerns the key
metarhetorical issue of ‘counsel’. It arises ultimately from Pieter Gillis’
innocent suggestion that Hythloday’s vast experience would fit him well
for a role as member of the council of some king. Hythloday demurs,
arguing that a man with his counter-cultural ideas would find no welcome
audience in such a context. He portrays royal councils as endemically
corrupt loci of political deliberation, in which flattery and self-interest
reign, and considerations of utility or advantage outweigh consideration of
what is morally right. Morus counters this pessimism by arguing that,
while a confrontational and unmodulated expression of ideas such as
Hythloday’s would undoubtedly meet with a hostile reception, this would
not necessarily be the case if he were prepared to adopt a more cautious
and rhetorically calculated approach. This is justified on grounds of public
interest reminiscent of Plutarch’s essay ‘A Philosopher Should Consort
Principally with Those in Power’: intellectuals have much to contribute to
public life and should consider it their duty to do so, whatever the personal
compromises involved.
Central to Morus’ argument in this portion of the dialogue is the notion
of a ductus obliquus, a term he uses to characterize the form of philosoph-
ical discourse acceptable within sensitive political contexts.
at neque insuetus et insolens sermo inculcandus, quem scias apud diuersa
persuasos pondus non habiturum, sed obliquo ductu conandum est, atque
adnitendum tibi, uti pro tua uirili omnia tractes commode. et quod in
bonum nequis uertere, efficias saltem, ut sit quam minime malum.34
You must not subject your listeners to unaccustomed and outlandish
speeches, when you know it will carry no weight with those persuaded of
the contrary; rather, using an oblique ductus, you should seek and strive with
all your power to handle things in a sensitive manner. In that way, what you
cannot turn to the good, you can at least make the least bad possible.
Hythloday picks the phrase up and throws it back at Morus scornfully
(‘I do not even see what you mean by oblique ductus’).35 In a council
setting, dissimulation is impossible; the only speakers who will be listened
to are those who ‘openly approve the worst proposals’ and ‘endorse the

33 34
See Cox 1992: 72. More 1995: 96 (my translation).
35
Ibid., 98 (nam obliquus ille ductus tuus non video quid sibi velit).
 Dialogue 305
most noxious decrees’.36 The only form of speech ethos Hythloday is
prepared to countenance is the candid manner that characterizes Christ,
whose ethical pronouncements, he reminds Morus, were more ‘outlandish’
(insolentia) – in the sense of challenging to conventional wisdom – than
anything he, Hythloday, has said.37
Morus’ allusion to ductus obliquus is to a relatively obscure, post-
classical portion of rhetorical doctrine most fully theorized in the Renais-
sance by the Greek-Italian humanist George of Trebizond, although
More probably knew the doctrine through the simpler versions found
in the late-antique theorists Fortunatianus and Martianus Capella.38 The
ductus of a speech was its overall strategy of argument. In Fortunatianus’
typology, it could be simplex (when the speaker simply states what he
means); subtilis (when he insinuates something other than what he states
directly); or figuratus or obliquus (when he disguises his true meaning and
speaks obliquely on account of, respectively, shame or fear). Trebizond’s
definition of ductus obliquus is different. He presents it as a combination
of a ductus simulatus, where the speaker argues for the case he supports,
but disguises his reasons for supporting it, and a ductus contrarius, where
he subtly seeks to persuade his audience of precisely the opposite of what
he is saying.
Although More introduces the notion of ductus obliquus within his
discussion of the ethics and tactics of political counsel, the concept is
clearly of utility in characterizing the rhetorical strategy of Utopia itself.
Where the fictive Hythloday illustrates the force and the limitations of a
ductus simplex within political discourse, the literary construct in which his
speeches are embedded could hardly be more oblique. It is not merely at a
macroscopic level, through structural distancing devices, that the work
strives to baffle any attempt at a univocal or ‘straight’ reading. Obliquity
even permeates the stylistic texture of the work, as Elizabeth McCutcheon
has demonstrated in her classic essay on litotes in Utopia. Consistently,
rather than asserting simpliciter, More prefers the more oblique locution of
double negation (e.g. non insuavis: ‘not lacking charm’). The result is a
pervasive textual dialogism, with phrase after phrase built around a tension
of opposites, creating an ambiguity that ‘vivifies the text . . . and agitates its
points, however casually they seem to be made’.39

36
Ibid., 100 (approbanda sunt aperte pessima consilia, et decretis pestilentissimis subscribendum est).
37
More 1995: 98.
38
For publications of the three theorists prior to 1516, see Green and Murphy 2006: 205–6, 214. For
discussion of ductus theory, see Cox 2003: 657–8, 660–7.
39
McCutcheon 1971: 118.
306 virginia cox
Any attempt to read Utopia as a political statement by the author seems
destined to founder in this quicksand of obliquity, and modern criticism
has rightly jettisoned past tendencies to see the text as advancing a political
program. Abstracting from the question of what More ‘really thought’,
however, it is intriguing as a hermeneutic hypothesis to consider Hythlo-
day’s speeches and More’s written text as parallel and specular, both
advancing the same theses, but one using a simple and one an oblique
ductus. Read in this sense, Utopia may be seen as an experiment in how
radical thinking might be brought in from the wilderness and insinuated
into political discourse in an urbane and ‘deniable’ guise. Where Hythlo-
day puts his views straight, without accommodating to his listeners, More
recasts them dialogically, anticipating and incorporating the resistance they
may engender in the figure of Morus. The result is a radical philosophy
that critiques itself even as it critiques society and its values.
Setting aside the particular case of Utopia, ductus theory offers a useful
tool in approaching literary dialogue, as it helps remind us of how self-
conscious rhetorically trained early modern readers were about the
differing relationships that can obtain between utterance and belief or
conviction. Where the modern reader often subconsciously takes a ductus
simplex as the default mode, and approaches works of moral and philo-
sophical reflection with the expectation of learning ‘the author’s views’, the
rhetorically informed readership of humanism was more nuanced in its
approach and more alert to dissimulatory tactics of argument. The very
existence of a typology of ductus as complex as George of Trebizond’s is a
product of such wary habits of reading; George honed his skills as a
theorist of ductus in his commentaries on Cicero’s speeches, attempting
to discern the Roman orator’s true agenda beneath his ostensible argu-
ments, bearing circumstantial factors in mind. This inquisitorial model of
reading is ideal as an approach to dialogue and positively demands to be
employed in the more complex works in the genre, both in interpreting
the overall strategy of the author and the interventions of individual
speakers. ‘What is he saying?’ and ‘what does he mean?’ were far from
synonymous questions for early modern readers. We should ensure they
are not, either, for us.

F U R T H E R RE A D IN G
Good modern editions are now available of a number of neo Latin dialogues: see,
for example, in the bilingual I Tatti Renaissance Library series, Bembo 2005,
Brandolini 2009, Giraldi 2011, Pontano 2012, Giovio 2013, Filelfo 2013; also
Filetico 1992, Celenza 1999, Gaisser 1999, Lipsius 2011 (though see Crab 2012
 Dialogue 307
on the Latin text in this edition). Erasmus’ Colloquia and Ciceronianus are
available in the Collected Works, published by Toronto University Press (1974 ).
In a few cases, English editions are available of texts found less readily in Latin; see
for example, Bodin 2008. Critical monographs specifically on neo Latin dialogue
are lacking, though IJsewijn and Sacré 1998 offers a good short overview, and
Tateo 1967 and Marsh 1980b survey fifteenth century Italian production. Essays
on individual texts and authors may be found in Geerts, Paternoster and Pignatti
2001 and in Heitsch and Vallée 2004. Kushner 2004 discusses the Latin and
vernacular traditions of dialogues in sixteenth century France.
 chapter 18

Shorter Prose Fiction

David Marsh

In the history of neo-Latin literature, compositions of short prose fiction

appear only sporadically and, unlike their vernacular counterparts, seldom
form part of any larger collection. There is little classical precedent for such
fiction, which fits no particular category of traditional poetics or literary
genre. Nevertheless, various men of letters – especially Italians – were
drawn to this kind of literature, for it offered a writer the chance to display
in Latin his wit and powers of invention, and also provided learned readers
with the amusement familiar from more popular works.
In Italy, short fiction in Latin was inevitably the learned double of the
vernacular novella, which attained its greatest perfection and success in the
Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75).1 Since its influence on Latin
prose fiction is decisive, several observations are in order. First, the work
emphasizes the social setting of its narrators and narratives. The so-called
frame of the Decameron establishes a courtly setting dominated by noble
women and their predilection for amorous tales, while the stories told more
often describe contemporary mercantile society than courtly or classical
settings.2 Second, the Decameron forms a link between classical Latinity
and emergent humanism: two of Boccaccio’s tales (Decameron 5.10: Pietro
di Vinciolo; and 7.2: Peronella) are based on episodes in Apuleius’ Meta-
morphoses, the most important Latin novel to survive from antiquity.3

Versions of Boccaccio
Boccaccio’s Italian prose inspired Latin translations by a number of
humanists. Most famously, his tale of patient Griselda, the last story of

1
The classic study is Di Francia 1924–1925. See now also Albanese 2000, Tunberg-Morrish 2014, Riley
2015, and Relihan, Chapter 20 in this volume.
2
In France, the novella tended to have a domestic setting dominated by men, and it is only with the
Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1460) that the Boccaccian model influences its French counterparts.
3
White 1977 and Gaisser 2008: 100–7.

308
 Shorter Prose Fiction 309
the Decameron (10.10) was rendered into Latin by his humanist friend
Petrarch in a Latin letter to the author (Seniles 17.3). This version enjoyed
wide circulation and often influenced later humanists who translated
Boccaccio.4 The Latin Griseldis is striking for two features external to its
narrative. First, Petrarch’s version is presented as an epistle; and later
humanists like Antonio Loschi (1368–1441), and Enea Silvio Piccolomini
(1405–64) would employ an epistolary frame in publishing their Latin
novellas.5 Second, in his epistolary introduction Petrarch voiced his clear
preference for the noble style of this tale as opposed to the comic and
popular tone of much of the Decameron.6 Petrarch’s version was translated
into Catalan by Bernat Metge in 1388, into French by Philippe de Mézières
in 1384–9, and into German by Gerhard Goss (1436) and by Niklas von
Wyle (1471).7 It also famously inspired the ‘Clerk’s Tale’ of Geoffrey
Chaucer (c. 1340–1400), who read it in Latin and in fact attributed the
tale to Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch), rather than Boccaccio. Then, more
than a century later, the Florentine humanist Nero de’ Nerli (1459–1524)
followed suit by translating the Griselda tale into Latin.8
Independently of Boccaccio, the development of Latin short fiction in
the late Middle Ages was in part influenced by the exempla, or illustrative
anecdotes, that were compiled for the use of orators and preachers. In
Trecento Italy, a parallel genre arose in the form of facetiae, or humorous
sayings, such as the De salibus virorum illustrium ac facetiis (‘Jokes and Jests
of Famous Men’) that Petrarch included in Book 2 of his Memorandarum
rerum libri (‘Books of Noteworthy Facts’). In the next generation, Franco
Sacchetti would compile a volume of Italian motti in his Trecentonovelle;
and a generation later, the humanist Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459) wrote
his popular Facetiae or Confabulationes (‘Jokes’ or ‘Conversations’), a book
of Latin anecdotes and jests that influenced the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles
(c. 1460), and was partly translated into French by Guillaume Tardif
(1492).9 An heir to Poggio’s ‘facetious’ achievement may be seen in the
treatise De sermone (‘On Conversation’) by the Neapolitan humanist
Giovanni Pontano (1429–1503), which relates a number of humorous

4
For Petrarch’s text, see Petrarch 1998. For a brief list of Latin versions from Boccaccio, see Branca
1991: 192, n. 89.
5 6
Albanese 1997, at 9. Cf. Marcozzi 2004: 143, n. 36. See Petrarch 1998: 15–25.
7
For the German versions, see Pabst 1967: 54, n. 2.
8
The version survives in the codex Florence, Biblioteca Moreniana 220. See Tournoy 1974b, with a
description of the codex at 260–1. An anonymous Quattrocento version of the Griselda tale (Parma,
Biblioteca Palatina 79; Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana 991) is reported by Branca 1991: 2.192, n. 89.
9
Poggio Bracciolini 1983 and 2005. For the French translation, see Tardif 2003.
310 david marsh
anecdotes and provides a bridge between Cicero’s digression on the
rhetorical uses of wit, and Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano (‘The Courtier’).10
Contemporary with the 1528 publication of Castiglione’s Italian dialogue
was the Latin treatise in two books De re aulica (‘On Life at Court’, 1528)
by the philosopher Agostino Nifo (1473–1545), which offers a series of
Latin facetiae.11 Nifo’s contemporary, the German scholar Heinrich Bebel
(1472–1518), compiled a book of prose Facetiae (1506) and also translated
Decameron 5.1 (Cimone) into Latin elegiacs.12
Indeed, the interest of humanists in Boccaccio’s fictions was primarily
rhetorical, and stressed the importance of speeches in defining characters’
oratorical response to their situation. Just as ancient controversiae or school
debates could inspire narratives in the Gesta Romanorum (‘Deeds of
the Romans’), so a fifteenth-century Milanese handbook for notaries con-
tains, inter alia, Petrarch’s Griselda, Loschi’s Fabula (Decameron 1.1), and
Salutati’s Declamatio Lucretie (‘Lucretia’s Declamation’) – works built
around declamatory set-pieces.13 In 1437, the humanist and historian Leo-
nardo Bruni (1370–1444) paid similar homage to Boccaccio by rendering
Decameron 4.1 in Latin as the Fabula Tancredi (‘Tale of Tancred’). Like
Petrarch’s Griselda, the work is notable for its elevated moral and rhetorical
tone; and was likewise translated into German by Niklas von Wyle (1477).14
In the early sixteenth century, the Ferrarese jurist, theologian, and Latin
poet Tommaso Melenchino made a verse translation of the Tancredi story
which survives in the Roman codex, Biblioteca Corsiniana 268.15
In a parallel tribute to Boccaccio, Bruni composed an Italian novella
called Seleuco based on an episode in Greek history. Where Tancredi
punishes his daughter with severity, the prince Seleucus, desperately in
love with his mother-in-law Stratonice, is pardoned by his father King
Antiochus, who in fact yields his wife to his son! Bruni’s intended contrast
between paternal severity and generosity was so striking that the Florentine
humanist Giannozzo Manetti (1396–1459) made it the subject of a debate
in his Dialogus in symposio (‘Banquet Dialogue’) of 1448.16
In 1444–5, Bartolomeo Facio (c. 1400–57) made a Latin version of
Decameron 10.1 (messer Ruggieri) that he dedicated to Alfonso of Aragon,
the king of Naples. More creatively, he composed De origine belli inter

10 11
Pabst 1967: 82–3. Nifo 2010.
12
Bebel’s Elegia Cimonis appeared in a 1512 Strasbourg edition, fols. 93v–100v, available online at
Sutton’s Philological Museum (Sutton online).
13
Cherchi 1983; Albanese 1997.
14
On Bruni’s version of the Tancredi tale, see Branca 1990; Marcelli 2000; Marcelli 2003.
15 16
Kristeller 1963: 169. See Albanese and Figliuolo 2014, Martelli 2000 and Marsh 1980a.
 Shorter Prose Fiction 311
Gallos et Britannos historia (‘The Origin of the Hundred Years’ War’). Set
in England, France and Rome, this complicated romance, which narrates
the vicissitudes of an English princess (a sort of royal Griselda), was soon
translated, rather freely, into Italian by Jacopo Bracciolini.17 Later in the
century, Boccaccio was translated by two Bolognese humanists: Giovanni
Garzoni (1419–1505) made Latin versions of Decameron 4.1 (Tancredi), 6.7
(Madonna Filippa), and 8.2 (Peronella), while the learned philologist
Filippo Beroaldo (1453–1505) rendered the Tancredi tale in Latin elegiacs,
and Decameron 5.1 (Cimone) and 10.8 (Tito and Gisippo) in prose.18
This last tale was the only one with a classical setting, and therefore
enjoyed particular favor among humanists. Besides Beroaldo, there were
five other Latin versions. The earliest is by Jacopo Bracciolini (1442–78),
son of the humanist Poggio and a scholar who was noted for his transla-
tions into both Latin and Italian.19 Around 1470 the Venetian jurist and
humanist Francesco Diedo (c. 1435–84) followed suit.20 In the next cen-
tury, the celebrated novelliere Matteo Bandello (1485–1561) published his
Titi Romani historia in Milan in 1509.21 In the same period, Roberto
Nobili, cardinal of Montepulciano, dedicated his Latin version of the tale
to Pope Julius II (1503–13).22 And in 1580 Francesco Mucanzio, master of
ceremonies to Pope Gregory XIII (1572–85), made a version that survives in
a single manuscript.23
In Ferrara, around 1460–70 the Neapolitan humanist and jurist Paolo
Marchesi, a friend of Ludovico Carbone (1430–85), translated Decameron
2.5 (Andreuccio da Perugia) into Latin.24 He dedicated his version to
Gaspar Talamanca, a royal secretary at the court in Naples.25 His

17
Albanese and Bessi 2000. Cf. Viti 1994. On Jacopo Bracciolini, see n. 9 above.
18
On Garzoni, see Mantovani 2009, texts edited at 264–81. See also Ridolfi 1999. On Beroaldo, see
Viti 1975. See also Gilmore 1983. Editions of the Mythica historia Cymonis and the Mythica historia de
Tito Romano et Gisippo Atheniensi, published in Leipzig c. 1498, are available online at Sutton’s
Philological Museum. Branca 1991: 2.192, n. 89, lists a Latin version of the Cimone tale by one Andrea
Dentier (London, British Museum, Add. Ms. 10300).
19 20
Merisalo 2009. See also Vasoli 1971. Tournoy 1970 and 1991a.
21
Modern edition in Bandelli 1983: 31–46 (introduction), 182–225 (Latin texts). See also Sapegno 1963.
22
See Wolff 1910: 581, n. 1.
23
MS Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria 1072 xi 17. The date of 1580 for Mucanzio is given by Tournoy
1981: 126. Tournoy lists a number of obscure translations but gives no references. His last entry for
the early modern period is ‘1648. Marcantonio Bonciario, Dec. x, 1’, which I am unable to verify. See
also Negri 1969.
24
A letter from Ludovico Carbone to Marchesi is addressed Clarissimo viro et prudentissimo
jurisconsulto Paulo Marchesio civi Neapolitano (Vat. Ottob. 1153, f. 33v).
25
I have consulted the copy in Vat. Barb. Lat. 2323, fols. 8–21v. The codex also contains Aurispa’s
translation of Lucian’s Dialogue of the Dead 25 (Alexander and Hannibal), fols. 1–7v, and Giannozzo
Manetti’s lives of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, fols. 22–87v.
312 david marsh
dedication was appropriate, since the tale recounts the Neapolitan adven-
tures of a merchant from Perugia. In Florence, Francesco Pandolfini
(1470–1520), a student of Ficino and Poliziano, translated Decameron 6.9
(Guido Cavalcanti) and 7.7 (madonna Beatrice) around 1487–8, and
dedicated them, respectively, to his friends Pietro Martelli and Angelo
Tubalia.26
In the next century, the Ferrarese prodigy Olimpia Fulvia Morata
(1526–55) translated the first two tales of the Decameron – 1.1 (ser Cepper-
ello) and 1.2 (Abraham the Jew) – which, as a convert to Protestantism,
she may have viewed as a call for religious tolerance.27 They were printed
in the 1562 Basel edition of her Orationes, dialogi, epistulae, carmina.28
The 1570 and 1580 reprints of these works also included five Latin versions
from Boccaccio by Marco Antonio Paganutio: 1.2 (Abraham the Jew),
3.8 (Ferondo), 3.9 (Giletta di Nerbona), 6.7 (madonna Filippa), and 10.1
(messer Ruggieri).29

Alberti and the Humanist Novella

Latin humanists also composed original novellas in Latin. In the last
decades of the Trecento, the humanist Giovanni Conversini (1343–1408)
was employed by Francesco Da Carrara, for whom he composed three
Latin novellas. The Familie Carrariensis natio (‘The Origin of the Carrara
Family’, 1380) offers a fictional romance – the union of an adventurer with
a noblewoman – that elucidates the origins of the Carrara dynasty; the
work both borrows from medieval romances and anticipates courtly
novelle by Masuccio and Bandello. In 1397, Conversini composed two
more tales with courtly settings: the Historia Elysiae or Violate pudicicie
narracio (‘Story of Elissa’ or ‘Tale of Violated Modesty’), and the Historia
Lugi et Conselicis or Dolosi astus narratio (‘Story of Luigi and Conselice’ or
‘Tale of a Deceitful Trick’) set in Ferrara.30
In 1451–3, the Florentine Francesco Tedaldi (c. 1420–c. 1490) composed
a Latin novella while residing in France, where he heard the story and
wrote it up for his friend Bartolomeo Buonconte.31 In 1482, the Pistoian

26 27
Pirovano 1998b: texts at 566–8. Pirovano 1997 and 1998a.
28
The edition is available online at Sutton’s Philological Museum: Decameron 1.1, pp. 20–40;
Decameron 1.2, pp. 40–7. See also Marcozzi 2004: 145.
29
Morata 1580.
30
See Leoncini 2000, Albanese 1998: 279–80 and Kohl 1983. Albanese and Leoncini have promised a
critical edition of all three works.
31
Kristeller 1956: text at 170–80; reprinted in Kristeller 1985: 385–402 (text at 392–402).
 Shorter Prose Fiction 313
grammarian Benedetto Colucci (c. 1438–c. 1506) dedicated his Historiola
amatoria (‘Short Tale of Love’) to the young Piero de’ Medici
(1472–1503).32 Set in Pistoia during the 1348 plague, this brief tale narrates
how ‘Romeo-and-Juliet’ lovers from rival families – Diego Cancellieri and
Francesca Rossi – are happily united when Diego rescues the comatose
Francesca from entombment. In 1493, Luigi Passerini of Brescia dedicated
his Historia lepida de quibusdam ebriis mercatoribus (‘Pleasant Story of
Drunken Merchants’) to the Bolognese Achille Volta; its theme of an
imagined shipwreck bears an affinity to Chaucer’s ‘Miller’s Tale’.33
In the Quattrocento, Italian humanists soon tried their hand at the
amatory tale typical of Boccaccio’s masterpiece. The most original of all
was Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72), who was both an accomplished Latinist
and a champion of the Tuscan vernacular. Following Boccaccio’s model of
the amatory soliloquy, he composed four works in Italian on the theme of
love: De amore, Deifira, Ecatonfilea and Sofrona; significantly, the last three
works feature characters with Greek names like those in the Decameron.
Tradition attributed to Alberti the Italian tale known as the Istorietta amorosa,
which is probably spurious.34 In any case, it was translated into Latin
sometime after 1481 by Paolo Cortesi (1465–1510) as the Historia Hippolyti
et Deyanirae (‘Story of Hippolytus and Dejanira’). Another Quattrocento
Italian text thus transformed was Alessandro Braccesi’s Historia di due amanti,
translated into Latin by Francesco Florio, Historia de amore Camilli et Emiliae
(‘Story of the Love between Camillus and Emilia’, 1467).35
More important for the history of short Latin fiction are the authentic
works that Alberti collected as his Intercenales (‘Dinner Pieces’).36 This
series of Latin dialogues and fables, some of them paired with Italian
translations, seems to have been assembled in eleven books between
1430 and 1440. Not all of the work has survived, but the extant text
contains at least seven narratives that reveal the influence of the vernacular
novella: Fatum et fortuna (‘Fate and Fortune’), Naufragus (‘Shipwrecked’),
Vidua (‘The Widow’), Defunctus (‘The Deceased’), Maritus (‘The Hus-
band’), Uxoria (‘Marriage’) and Amores (‘The Love Affair’).37 Alberti

32 33
Frugoni 1939. See also Ristori 1982. Di Francia 1924–5: 322–33.
34
Furlan 2003: 213–15 rejects as spurious the Quattrocento novella Istorietta amorosa, which Grayson
included (albeit with reservations) in vol. iii of the Opere volgari. Grayson 1973: 406–12.
35
Tournoy 1991b; Pietragalla 2000; Marcozzi 2004: 160. On Florio, see Viti 1997. On Braccesi, see
Perosa 1971.
36
Latin text and Italian translation in Alberti 2003 and in Alberti 2010; English translation from
Alberti 1987.
37
Ricci 2007.
314 david marsh
evidently considered these works of some importance, and an allusion to
two of them gives us a clue to the date of their composition. In his
autobiography of 1437, he mentions ‘The Deceased’ and ‘The Widow’ as
two humorous pieces that he completed before he was thirty (1434).
Although presented as dialogues, two of Alberti’s dinner pieces describe
the perils of shipwreck – a clearly Boccaccian theme, as we shall see. ‘Fate
and Fortune’ relates the symbolic dream of a philosopher, who beheld a
turbulent river of Life in which various souls and vessels sought to stay afloat
and reach the safety of its banks. Some critics have compared this ostensibly
medieval allegory to Boccaccio’s tale of Landolfo Rufolo in Decameron 2.4;
and indeed both narratives offer meticulous details in describing how
survival at sea often requires planks or other flotation devices. But Boccac-
cio’s protagonist is literally saved by his good fortune: he washes ashore on a
chest containing a treasure of precious gems. By contrast, Alberti lauds the
souls who spurn larger vessels that often run aground, and instead cling to
the planks which ‘among mortals are called the liberal arts’.38
A second narrative of disaster at sea is Alberti’s ‘Shipwrecked’, which
imitates features of Boccaccio’s tale of Alatiel in Decameron 2.7. In Boccaccio,
the princess Alatiel, daughter of the sultan of Babylon, sails from Alexandria to
marry the Moroccan king of Garbo (El Gharb); but the ship is wrecked off the
coast of Majorca, and everyone on board perishes aside from Alatiel and her
maidservants. Rescued by one Pericon da Visalgo, she eventually succumbs to
his advances; and in a series of adventures provoked by male lust and anger,
she is repeatedly kidnapped and seduced. After some four years and nine
lovers, she returns to her father, and weds the king of Garbo as a virgin. Alberti
reduces this elaborate story to three characters trapped in a shipwrecked hull:
the honest narrator, an innocent virgin, and a violent ‘barbarian’. Rather than
rape, the violence in the tale is cannibalism, which the barbarian attempts to
perpetrate when starvation threatens the imprisoned trio. After the narrator
and young girl defeat him, they are soon rescued and brought to the nearest
port, where the expected bride is met by her thankful groom. Alberti was
aware that such a tale would, like Boccaccio’s adventure, find vernacular
readers, and translated the work into Italian.39
The appeal of the story lies in the Grand Guignol of the struggle between
the violent cannibal and his intended victims. Here is the climax of the tale:

Magno enim emisso eiulatu: “Aut me” clamitans inquit “mactate, aut
vestrum profecto alter cadat necesse est.” . . . puelle insonti lachrime et

38 39
Alberti 1987: 25; Alberti 2003: 50. Ponte 1999; Furlan 2003.
 Shorter Prose Fiction 315
mihi pro immeritis apud immitissimam belluam oranti preces deficiebant,
cum demens et furiis debacchatus truculentissimus barbarus in teterrimum
scelus irrupit . . . belluam ipsam cum in puellam, tum et in me frementem
morsibusque crassantem multa vi desudans averti, eiusque furentis manu
destra meise ambabus minibus apprehensa, brachium ad tergum intor
quens, ut pre dolore eiularit, detinui . . . levam quidem manum, qua solute
quidem barbarus infestissime sese nobis prebebat, correpsit et adtortam in
tergum adduxit; mox ultimam linteolam, que exutis reliquis madentibus
vestibus supererat, discidit in fascias, ut illis ambas ferocissimi barbari
manus penes terga revinxerimus. Nonnullos tamen in eo duello morsus
atque in femore gravissimos plerosque pugnos excepi; qui quidem, tametsi
erat constrictus, voce territando . . . tabulataque ipsa navis dentibus demor
debat, dislacerabat, mandebat.
With a loud bellow, he cried: “Either you must kill me, or one of you must
die!” . . . The innocent girl was exhausting her tears, and I my entreaties on
her behalf, when the crazed, raging, and fierce barbarian leapt to his
monstrous crime . . . With a great effort, I pulled the beast away, as he
raged and bit at the girl and me. With both hands, I caught the right hand
of the frenzied savage, and twisted his arm behind his back, so that he
howled with pain . . . [The girl] took hold of the savage’s left hand, which
was still free to menace us, and bent it against his back. Then she ripped off
the last bit of fabric which remained after she had removed her wet clothes,
and tore it into strips, which we used to bind both of the wild barbarian’s
hands behind his back. During the struggle, I sustained several bites and a
number of painful blows on my thigh from this monster, who, even while
firmly bound, frightened us with his cries and . . . even bit off some of the
ship’s board work, shredding and chewing it in his teeth.40

At this critical point in the narrative, Alberti cannot resist citing a

series of classical examples that demonstrate the irresistible power of
hunger:
Nimirum igitur, Silio poete ut assentiar, ipsa a nobis perpessa calamitas
edocuit; qui etsi ultimo periculi metu parumper a fame sentienda alieni
eramus, eam tamen esse durissimam et intolerabilem sentiebamus: ‘Nihil
enim tolerare piget: rabidi ieiunia ventris insolitis adigunt vesci.’ Ut nunc
quidem queque de Sagunto, queque de Hyerosolima et queque de Cassilino
oppido litteris tradita sunt facile apud me fidem faciant: fuisse qui rudentes,
quei ligneos cortices, quid scutorum pelles, valavarum vectes pestiferasque
herbas ac denique qui filios fame tracti comederint; et fuisse quidem
nonnullos, qui pre fame in Tybrim aut e muris nudos inter hostium tela
precipites sese dederint.

40
Latin: Alberti 2003: 584–6; English: Alberti 1987: 162–3.
316 david marsh
I must concur with the poet Silius Italicus that the calamity we suffered
taught us how bitter and intolerable hunger is although for a moment we
scarcely felt it, in our fear of this new danger: ‘Starvation makes a rabid
stomach welcome any nourishment, and drives men to eat strange foods.’
Hence, I can easily believe the stories told about the sieges at Saguntum,
Jerusalem and Cassilinum. They say that, driven by hunger, some people
have eaten ropes, some bark from trees, some leather from shields, some
latches from doors, some deadly herbs and some their own children.
Because of hunger, some have hurled themselves into the Tiber, or have
plunged naked from city walls onto an enemy’s weapons.41
Five of Alberti’s dinner pieces deal with the traditional topic of marriage and
its vicissitudes. The longest of these is Defunctus (‘The Deceased’), a Lucianic
‘dialogue of the dead’ in which the title character witnesses the aberrant
behavior of his wife and kinsmen after his demise. His denunciations of his
wife’s flagrant infidelity seem to echo the strident misogyny of Boccaccio’s
late invective Corbaccio rather than the more tolerant Decameron. Both
Defunctus and Corbaccio portray a dialogue held in the afterlife. In Boccaccio,
the unhappy lover dreams that he meets a friend in the Underworld who
denounces the ways of women. In Alberti, two souls meet after death, and
Neophronus (‘newly-wise’) relates to his friend Polytropus (‘experienced’)
the hypocrisy that he beheld when he visited the earth on the day of his
funeral. The first shocking episode – borrowed from Lucian’s Cataplus (‘The
Voyage Down’) – relates how the deceased’s wife and his steward made love
that very day: a scene that causes Polytropus to decry the falsity of women.
This is followed by his son’s outbursts of hatred, the destruction of his library
by kinsmen, a bishop’s fatuous sermon, and the plundering of his hidden
treasure by a hostile neighbour. In both works, the protagonist is (like the
author himself) a scholar whose studies should have put him on his guard
against female perfidy.
Book 7 of the ‘Dinner Pieces’ consists of two tales that examine the
problems of married life. Maritus (‘The Husband’) tells the tale of a wife
caught with her lover, and then forgiven by a tolerant husband. This
closely follows Boccaccio’s tale of Pietro di Vinciolo (Decameron 5.10),
which in turn is based on an episode in Book 9 of Apuleius’ Metamorph-
oses.42 Boccaccio’s tale ends with a rather amicable dinner, and the peaceful
departure of the lover the next morning; and the storyteller Dioneo –
the author’s alter ego – advises the ladies to enjoy love when they can.

41
Latin: Alberti 2003: 586–8; English: Alberti 1987: 162–3.
42
Marsh 2000; see also White 1977 on Boccaccio and Apuleius.
 Shorter Prose Fiction 317
By contrast, Alberti’s wronged husband later takes revenge by treating his
wife with cold indifference, and eventually drives her to suicide. For this,
he is praised for combining patience and severity in dealing with his
wife’s infidelity.
Set in ancient Sparta, Uxoria (‘Marriage’) presents a debate between
three sons who seek to win their father’s inheritance by proving their
superiority in facing the challenges of married life. Mitio, whose name
suggests ‘meek’ and echoes that of Micio in Terence’s Adelphoe (‘Brothers’),
boasts of tolerating an intransigent wife; Acrinnus (‘harshly severe’) vaunts
his absolute control of his wife; and the youngest son Trissophus (‘thrice-
wise’) proudly asserts that he has remained single despite the urgings of his
family to marry. The debate ends without a declared winner, and the
father’s symbolic insignia are hung in a temple. This inconclusive three-
part debate has reminded readers of the tale of Melchisedech (Decameron
1.3), in which the sagacious Jew uses a parable to prove the validity of the
three great religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam. He recounts the
story of a father who loved his three sons equally, and who therefore
bequeathed them identical rings, so that none could claim superiority.
Concluding Alberti’s extant collection, Book 11 offers two stories that
portray women in illicit relationships. In ‘The Widow’, which is presented
as a dialogue, a widow and her aged servant plot to conceal an unwanted
pregnancy until she can secretly give birth to the child. The source of the
tale is not clear, but it appears to owe something to Roman comedy.
(Alberti’s first Latin composition was a play called Philodoxus that he
circulated as the work of an ancient playwright named Lepidus.) Thus,
early in the dialogue the old woman says Te ego <et re>, ut aiunt, et
consilio fortasse iuvabo (‘I’ll aid you perhaps with resources, as they say, and
counsel’) – a phrase adapted from Plautus’ Pseudolus.43 Indeed, we recall
that unwanted pregnancy is involved in Plautus’ Amphitruo, Aulularia and
Truculentus, as well as in Terence’s Hecyra and Adelphoe. And Alberti’s first
essay in literary Latin was the allegorical comedy Philodoxus (c. 1424).
In ‘The Love Affair’, Durimna (‘hard woman’), the wife of Fabellius,
torments her husband’s best friend, the student Friginnius, by arousing his
passion for her and then denying him any satisfaction. The cruelty of the
plot clearly recalls Decameron 8.7, in which a widow causes a scholar in
love to spend a night freezing in the snow; but unlike Alberti, Boccaccio
has the scholar take revenge. His scholar lures the widow one summer

43
Pseudolus 19: iuvabo aut re aut opera aut consilio bono (‘I’ll help with resources or labor or good
counsel’). Alberti frequently uses the phrase ‘as they say’ (ut aiunt) to indicate a classical quotation.
318 david marsh
night to ascend a tower platform, where the next day she is revealed naked,
exposed to stinging insects and the scorching sun. But as in ‘The
Deceased’, Alberti has also used an ancient source, an episode in Lucian’s
Toxaris or ‘On Friendship’.44 Lucian was also an important influence on
other neo-Latin writers of the sixteenth century. His paradoxical encomia
inspired Erasmus’ ‘Praise of Folly’; and the fantastic voyage of his ‘True
Story’ inspired Thomas More’s Utopia.45
Although the ‘Dinner Pieces’ were mostly dispersed until the 1960s,
Alberti’s Quattrocento editor, Girolamo Massaini, regarded him as a modern
Apuleius for his diverting narratives.46 To be sure, Boccaccio himself had
drawn upon the Metamorphoses in two tales of his Decameron (5.10; 7.2).47
But Alberti surpasses his Tuscan predecessor as an eclectic and idiosyncratic
author. As a voracious scholar, he draws on a vast range of literary sources;
and as a fluent stylist in both Latin and Italian, he commands a dazzling
variety of registers that blend lofty eloquence with earthy humor.

Piccolomini’s De Duobus Amantibus Historia

and Latin Prose Style
The most important Latin tale of the Quattrocento, De duobus amantibus
historia (‘The Tale of Two Lovers’), was written by Enea Silvio Piccolo-
mini (1405–64), a Sienese humanist who worked at the council of Basel
and was later elected Pope Pius II.48 He purportedly reports a love affair
that occurred in 1432–3, when Sigismund III, king of Lombardy, traveled
to Rome to be crowned Holy Roman Emperor. While in Vienna, Picco-
lomini sent the tale with a letter dated 3 July 1444 to his Sienese law
professor Mariano Sozzini; and in a second letter, addressed to the imperial
chancellor Kaspar Schlick (1396–1449), Piccolomini hints that his tale is a
true account of a love affair that Schlick had while attending the emperor
in Siena, which he calls the Civitas Veneris (‘City of Venus’). The author
also confesses that he has treated this lowly subject only to comply with the
wishes of his patrons – a classical modesty topos. The success of this tale
was phenomenal. It was not only translated into German by Niklas von
Wyle, but stirred the interest of French writers in composing novellas, and
even inspired Matteo Bandello.49 The first edition appeared in Cologne in

44
Marsh 1983 and Marsh 1998: 31–3.
45
Marsh 1998: 167–76 (Erasmus), 193–7 (More). See also Chapter 20 in this volume.
46 47
On Massaini, see Marsh and d’Alessandro 2008–9. See n. 3 above.
48 49
Piccolomini 2007: 311–45. Pabst 1967: 49–54; Pirovano 2002; Marcozzi 2004: 158–61.
 Shorter Prose Fiction 319
1468, and by 1600 had been translated into Italian, French, German,
Spanish, Polish, Hungarian and English.50
The story is set in Siena, the native city of the author and his dedicatee,
but its characters all bear classical names that alert the reader to the
author’s erudition. The plot is simple. One of the emperor’s retinue, a
German named Euryalus, falls in love with the Sienese housewife Lucretia,
who is married to the wealthy Menelaus. Although his German servant
Sosias tries to dissuade him, Euryalus sends a letter to Lucretia by an old
bawd, which Lucretia tears up in a fit of passion. (When he writes more
letters, Euryalus asks Italian friends to help him with his Tuscan prose.)
Quattrocento authors writing Latin novellas had few prose models to
guide them. Some writers, like Alberti, drew upon the colloquial speech of
the Roman comedians Plautus and Terence. Meanwhile, the influence of
Apuleius – whose Metamorphoses had supplied two Boccaccian plots –
began to make itself felt in the 1440s, as Italian humanists occasionally
imitated his mannered prose.51 For amatory topics, Italian authors most
often had recourse to snippets of classical Latin poetry, especially (although
not only) the elegists. Hence, even though Piccolomini describes the lovers
as communicating in the vernacular, his narrative is laced with allusions to
Latin poets – Ovid, Virgil, and Seneca – and cites instances of classical
mythology that not every Sienese housewife will have known.52 In particular,
he inserts echoes of Terence’s comedies and Seneca’s Phaedra, texts notable
for their dramatization of amorous passion.53 Indeed, the exchange of letters
between Euryalus and Lucretia – there are ten in all – clearly evokes the
situation of Ovid’s Heroides, in which women separated from their lovers
write verse epistles about their plight. Like Alberti expatiating on the power
of hunger, his contemporary curialist cannot resist a purple passage on
the irresistible force of love. Before he sends his first letter to Lucretia,
Euryalus delivers this soliloquy, which is filled with echoes of Ovid, Seneca
and Virgil:
Herculem dicunt, qui fuit fortissimus et certa deorum soboles, pharetris et
leonis spolio positis, colum suscepisse passumque aptari digitis smaragdos et
dari legem rudibus capillis, et manu, que clavam gestare solebat, properante
fuso duxisse fila. Naturalis est hec passio. Sentit ignes genus aligenum; nam
niger a viridi turtur amatur ave et variis albe iunguntur sepe columbe . . .

50 51
See Piccolomini 1999. On the Renaissance fortune of Apuleius, see Gaisser 2008.
52
Pittaluga 1989; Pirovano 2000.
53
Piccolomini 2007: 344–5: Van Heck 1994 records twenty-four echoes of Terence and twenty of
Seneca’s Phaedra.
320 david marsh
movet pro coniugio bella iumentum, timidi cervi prelia poscunt et concepti
furoris dant signa mugientes, uruntur hircine tigres, vulnificus aper dentes
acuit, peni quatiunt terga leones. Cum movit amor, ardent insane Ponti
belve. Nihil immune est, nihil amori negatum.
They say that Hercules, the strongest of men, and a clear descendant of the
gods, laid by his arrows and his lion skin trophy, and took up a distaff,
letting emeralds be fitted on his fingers, and law enforced on his rough
locks; and in that hand, with which he but now bore the club, he spun out
threads on the flying spindle. This passion is normal. The winged race feels
the flames: thus a dark turtledove is loved by a greener bird, and white
doves are often mated with colourful ones . . . the bull undertakes battle for
his mate, and timid stags challenge to war; and by their roaring give token
of their engendered passion. The tigers of Hircania burn; the boar whets his
death dealing tusks and African lions shake their spines. When Love has
roused them, the crazed beasts of Pontus are ablaze. Nothing is safe from
love, and nothing denied it.54
At last, a tryst is arranged: Euryalus will disguise himself as a peasant
delivering grain. Before the plan is realized, the narrator indignantly decries
the daring of lovers, whose bestiality is symbolized in the metamorphoses
recounted by Ovid and Virgil.55
As in Boccaccio’s tales based on Apuleius (Decameron 5.10 and 7.2), the
cuckolded husband returns home suddenly, and Euryalus is nearly dis-
covered hiding in a closet. But the resourceful Lucretia cunningly knocks a
box of legal documents out the window in order to distract her husband
and his steward. After the two have made love, Euryalus escapes. A second
assignation is planned when the husband is away in the country, and the
lovers’ accomplice Sosias shrewdly confines his fellow-servant Dromo to
the kitchen. Once more, Menelaus returns unexpectedly; but Euryalus
again escapes, and now enlists Pandalus to help him reach Lucretia. After
the next tryst, they succeed in seeing each other several times, until
Euryalus must depart for Rome with the emperor. After another exchange
of letters, Euryalus departs; and returning to Siena finds no way to
approach his love. Eventually he follows the emperor back to Bohemia,
where he is given a young and noble bride.

54
Piccolomini 2007: 318; sources identified on p. 344.
55
Ibid., 327: hoc est, quod Ovidius Metamorphoseos vult, dum fieri ex hominibus aut bestias scribit aut
lapides aut plantas. hoc et poetarum eximius Maro sensit, cum Circes amatores in terga ferarum verti
cantavit. nam ita est: ex amoris flamma sic mens hominis alienatur, ut parum a bestiis differat. (‘This is
what Ovid in his Metamorphoses means when he writes that men become beasts or stones or plants;
and the excellent poet Virgil sensed this when he sang how Circe’s lovers were changed into beasts,
for the flame of love so alters the human mind that it hardly differs from that of beasts.’)
 Shorter Prose Fiction 321
Piccolomini’s popular fiction combines a number of genres, introducing
citations of Roman elegiac poetry into essentially Boccaccian situations.
Yet unlike many of his contemporaries he did not compose any books of
poetry.56 As noted above, the lovers’ use of learned epistles in the narrative
naturally relies on the tradition of Ovid’s Heroides, and seems to anticipate
the epistolary novel of the eighteenth century.
As we have seen, translations of stories from Boccaccio continued into
the sixteenth century. Yet there was another current of fiction that grew
out of Quattrocento Latin prose narratives. Building on his experience
with Latin novellas, Leon Battista Alberti composed a Latin novel in four
books titled Momus (c. 1450). The protagonist is the Greek god of mockery
whose earthly and heavenly adventures – like those in several of Alberti’s
‘Dinner Pieces’ – are indebted to the Greek satirist Lucian. This much
longer work is discussed in the next chapter.
Building on the recent proliferation of studies in the field, the present
essay has traced the history of neo-Latin short fiction in the Italian
Renaissance. To be sure, many of the novellas described above constitute
isolated exercises in Latin prose that have only recently been exhumed
from manuscript sources and edited in learned journals. They interest the
contemporary reader primarily as illustrations of the humanist reception of
Boccaccio and the novella tradition. By contrast, original compositions like
Piccolomini’s Historia de duobus amantibus and Alberti’s Intercenales and
Momus played an essential role in the transition from medieval fabliaux
and facetiae to the rise of the European novel.

FURTHER READING
Riley 2015 discusses Latin fiction as a whole (both longer and shorter forms), while
Tunberg 2014 concentrates on the novel. The survey by Di Francia 1924 5, while
dated, offers much useful information. For classical Latin fiction, see Hofmann
1999. Marcozzi 2004 provides a rich bibliography of Quattrocento novellas. On
vernacular novellas, see Pabst 1967 and Auerbach 1971. On Piccolomini’s popular
Historia, see Pirovano 2000 and 2002, and the edition in Piccolomini 2007.

56
On humanist poetry, see Marsh 2015.
 chapter 19

Longer Prose Fiction

Stefan Tilg

Introduction
The longer Latin prose fiction of the early modern period is a compara-
tively neglected field. There are very few modern editions of texts, we do
not have a single larger study of the genre, and we even lack a more or less
complete list of relevant titles.1 We know about twenty to thirty essential
texts, although this figure could be considerably increased if we added
related texts from prose satire, historiography, biography and similar genres
which include fictional elements. Longer neo-Latin prose fiction runs as a
trickle until c. 1600, then quickly swells to a torrent in the first half of the
seventeenth century, is reduced to a stream in its second half and dries up
in the eighteenth century (with two very notable exceptions). A full
account of this development over time would be complex, but the huge
influence of the Latin novels of John Barclay, who was writing at the
beginning of the seventeenth century, and the heightened interest in
current affairs – often a point of reference for longer prose fiction – during
the period of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) can be singled out as the two
most important factors.
In this chapter I offer a preliminary outline of the field by discussing
what I see as the major and minor strands. I use the terms ‘longer prose
fiction’ and ‘novel’ synonymously, as is usual, for instance, in Classics,
but not in English literature (where ‘novel’ tends to be restricted to a
certain type of realistic prose fiction emerging in the eighteenth cen-
tury). I first discuss the major strands of the satirical novel, the romantic
novel and the utopian novel individually, and then add a summary
account of minor strands. I conclude with a general consideration of the
link between neo-Latin longer prose fiction and reality, and of its
literary techniques.

1
IJsewijn and Sacré 1998: 256.

322
 Longer Prose Fiction 323

Major Strands
Few authors can claim to have shaped even a single literary tradition. John
Barclay (1582–1621), Scottish by birth and French by education, shaped
two, the satirical and the romantic novel à clef. The third major strand of
longer neo-Latin fiction is utopian and can easily be traced back to
Thomas More’s (1478–1535) seminal Utopia of 1516.

Major Strand A: The Satirical Novel

The satirical novel is the only strand which was to some extent considered
in early modern literary theory; not as novel, however, but as Menippean
satire, a genre characterized by its prosimetric form and satirical outlook.2
Historical and modern approaches conflict here because there were two
traditions of Menippean satire (which are sometimes combined), one less,
the other more narrative, with the more narrative tradition overlapping
with the modern idea of the novel. I. de Smet describes these two
traditions as ‘Varronian’ and ‘Petronian’.3 This distinction refers respect-
ively to Varro (116–27 bce), the Roman pioneer of Menippean satire, and
Petronius.4 The Varronian tradition tends to be static, non-narrative and
focused on a single event such as Emperor Claudius’ trial in the afterlife
in Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis (the only fully extant Roman example of
Menippean satire). The Petronian tradition is more dynamic, narrative
and episodic. In this chapter, I consider only the Petronian tradition.
The founding work of the neo-Latin Petronian tradition is John
Barclay’s Euphormionis Lusinini satyricon (‘Euphormio of Lusinia’s
Satyricon’), published in two parts in 1605 and 1607.5 During this period,
Barclay was preparing his move from France to the English court of
James I – the first part of the Euphormio is dedicated to James, and the
second part ends with the hero’s journey to England, presented as an ideal
state under an ideal ruler. Barclay’s own arrival in London inaugurated his
European career as a highly respected and versatile diplomat – some years

2
See generally IJsewijn 1999, and for a fuller discussion of Menippean satire, Chapter 20 in this
volume.
3
De Smet 1996: esp. 60–8.
4
Both Varro’s and Petronius’ works are extant only in fragments, with the Satyrica transmitted in
more substantial parts than Varro’s Menippean satires. Note, however, that the most extended and
coherent part of the Satyrica, the Cena Trimalchionis, was published only in 1664.
5
Edition and English translation by Fleming 1973. My translations normally follow the English
translations indicated in the footnotes (where applicable; sometimes with minor adaptations).
324 stefan tilg
later he entered the service of Pope Paul V in Rome and sought the favour
of the French king Louis XIII. His political celebrity across Europe
also aided the success of his fiction, which reflected his diplomatic experi-
ence and introduced a new way of dealing with current affairs in literature.
In fact, the publication history of the Euphormio demonstrates that his
work was also read as a kind of ‘Barclay romance’: the author’s apology for
any satiric wrongdoings in his Apologia Euphormionis pro se (‘Euphormio’s
Apology for Himself’, 1610) was published as part three of the Euphormio,
and his Icon animorum (‘Image of [different] Minds’, 1614), a completely
unrelated account of European national characters, was printed as part
four. Later continuations of the Euphormio by Claude Barthélemy Morisot
(1624, published as part five) and Gabriel Bugnot (1674, published as
part six) prove its enormous success, as does the plethora of editions
and translations (around fifty of them) produced before the end of the
eighteenth century.
The basic idea of the Euphormio is expressed in its first sentences, often
imitated in later satirical novels:
Si nomen a me quaeris, Euphormio sum; si patriam, Lusinia est, ubi nullae
unquam nubes caelum asperant, nulla bruma segetes extinguit, nulli aestus
adurunt [. . .] Non illic in honore supellex curiosa, non gemmae, non
imperium, non opes, non ea omnia quibus impotens hominum libido
pretium fecit [. . .] Illinc ego devolutus in hunc terrarum orbem, o dolor,
quae non vidi, quae non passus sum indigna!
If you want to know my name, it is Euphormio. My country? Lusinia a
place where clouds never trouble the heavens, where winter’s blasts never
freeze the crops, summer’s heat never sets them aflame [. . .] Here no one
worships fancy furniture, jewels, power, wealth, or any of those things on
which the sterile lust of men sets a high price [. . .] When from this place
I came down to the present world O misery! What did I not see, what
shameful things not suffer!
The Euphormio is a reversed utopia, in which the naive protagonist comes
from his perfect (and imaginary) country ‘Lusinia’ to contemporary
Europe with its rotten characters and institutions. The culture shock is
inevitable. At the beginning of the first part, Euphormio does not know
that eating and drinking in Europe costs money and runs up debt.
A nobleman who pretends to be his friend pays for him and makes him
his servant (later Euphormio escapes). The remainder of the first part
consists of a loose string of adventures, dealing with magic, erotic affairs,
conflicts with the Jesuits (one of Barclay’s favourite targets), and visits to
courts and a number of countries. All this gives Euphormio plenty of
 Longer Prose Fiction 325
opportunity to learn and lament the vanity and vices of the world. In a
pessimistic ending we see him in Paris, where he bumps into one of his
master’s men and is forced to flee once again. The second part has longer
episodes and is more coherent, with fewer satirical targets – the Jesuits, the
French court and the papacy – and a happy ending in Euphormio’s final
journey to England.
The most important characteristic which made this simple story a sensa-
tion and proved immensely influential for the further development of
seventeenth-century prose fiction is its sophisticated allegory as a roman-à-
clef. In my brief summary above I have already resolved the allegory, but in
fact all names in the Euphormio are fictional, and the extent to which they
represent specific individuals and institutions varies from case to case. The
author has made it easy in some cases: the Jesuits are represented by the
character Acignius, an anagram of their founder Ignatius (of Loyola; here in
the variant spelling Ignacius); Britain is called Scolimorrhodia, from the
Greek words for ‘thistle’ (skolumos) and ‘rose’ (rhodon), referring to the
emblems of Scotland and England respectively; its king is known as Tessar-
anactus, the ‘four-fold master’ (from tessara, ‘four’, and anax, ‘master’),
alluding to James’ title as king of England, Scotland, Ireland and France.
Some characters, like the nobleman Callion, Euphormio’s master in the first
part, were probably meant to designate types rather than certain individuals.
Other characters are an elusive composite of fact and fiction, or perhaps
meant something only to Barclay’s inner circle. Euphormio himself, despite
obvious autobiographical touches, is not simply Barclay but a complex
narrator who matures over time and comes to mock his younger self. This
dense and subtle mix of persona, fact and fiction fascinated Barclay’s
contemporaries and made him nothing less than the founder of the
following tradition of romans-à-clef, a wildly popular fictional mode in the
seventeenth century, with considerable success beyond that period.6
Although Barclay himself was careful enough to avoid explicit identifi-
cations, his editors soon attached keys to the work, which gave helpful but
also oversimplified correspondences between fictional and historical char-
acters. Such formal keys became a hallmark of the reception of the genre.
Further significant examples include the Gaeomemphionis Cantaliensis
satyricon (‘Gaeomemphio of Cantal’s Satyricon’, 1628) by French classicist
François Guyet, a close imitation of Barclay’s Euphormio, but more moral-
izing and pessimistic;7 the Satyricon in corruptae iuventutis mores corruptos
(‘Satyricon against the Corrupted Morals of the Corrupted Young’, 1631)
6 7
See e.g. Rösch 2004. Edition by Desjardins 1972a; French translation by Desjardins 1972b.
326 stefan tilg
by Leiden professor Jan Bodecher Benningh, an attack upon the profligate
life of Leiden students;8 or James Hume’s Pantaleonis vaticinia satyra
(‘Pantaleon’s Prophetic Satire’, 1633), a relatively short story about the
travels and adventures of a lecherous young stranger.9
None of Barclay’s seventeenth-century followers in Latin satirical prose
fiction was as successful, and hardly any as skilled in creating a lively and
intriguing narrative, but the genre was appreciated by the learned because
of its contemporary relevance (as opposed to sentimental romance) and its
display of classical erudition. The latter characteristic is not always to the
modern taste. The Latin is sometimes recherché to the point of obscurity,
and the narrative voice is quick to insert a classical reminiscence, theoret-
ical discourse, or quotation of poetry in a markedly artificial fashion. The
fabric of fiction remains loose. Compare, for instance, how Euphormio
bursts out into hexameters when entrusting himself to the Jesuit school
at the beginning of part two:
Acignius [. . .] me ad infimi ordinis scholasticum manu duxit, et in audi
torum numerum redegit:
O pater, Aoniae moderator maxime turbae,
Qui Xanthum Lyciamque colis, Delonque vagantem,
Et Claron, et Delphis famam vocalibus addis:
Da faciles vultus, meque ad tua limina deduc.
Acignius [. . .] led me by the hand to the master of the lowest form and
consigned me among his listeners:
O father, greatest leader of the Aonian flock,
You, who dwell the Xanthus, Lycia, wandering Delos
And Claros, and who bring sonorous Delphi fame:
Grant me a mild countenance and lead me to your threshold.

The resulting impression is often that of a stilted and openly moralizing

Petronius.10 But the contribution of the genre to the further development
of prose fiction is important, and it was always open to creative innovation:
Ludvig Holberg’s brilliant Iter subterreaneum of 1741, for instance, which
I discuss below, may be seen as combining elements of the satirical and the
utopian novel.

8
See De Smet 2000.
9
A hypertext edition and an English translation of this rare work has recently been posted by
M. Riley at www.philological.bham.ac.uk/hume/.
10
Cf. Grafton 1990 on how Petronius himself came to be read this way by the writers of satirical
novels.
 Longer Prose Fiction 327

Major Strand B: The Romantic Novel

It was Barclay himself who adapted the allegorical and historical tech-
niques of the Euphormio to create another successful strand of longer
Latin prose fiction, the romantic novel. With his Argenis (1621),11 Barclay
managed to elevate and ennoble the romance genre, and he points out
from the beginning that his way of writing romance will be new, that is
historical and political. His dedication to the French king, Louis XIII,
begins with the phrase Novo isti generi scriptionis . . . ut faveas (‘I hope you
cherish this new genre of literature’), and the following preview of the
content highlights the political dimension of the story and its character as
mirror for princes. Among other things, Louis is alerted explicitly to the
similarity between himself and his ‘countryman’ Poliarchus, the hero of
the story.
On the face of it, the plot of the Argenis is a romantic novel of love and
adventure, set in a vague past of the Mediterranean before Roman rule.
The story unfolds in many twists and turns over five books. The scene is
set in medias res by the arrival of the young African gallant Archombrotus
on the shores of Sicily, where he meets Poliarchus, a young man later
revealed to be from France. Poliarchus loves the beautiful Argenis, the
daughter of the Sicilian king Meleander, but is forced to flee to Mauritania
after he loses the favour of the king. After a complex sequence of plots,
rebellions, battles and rival suitors for Argenis, the pair are finally reunited
and allowed to marry.
Beneath this basic romance plot is concealed a complex historical and
political allegory which denies simple correspondences, here even more so
than in the Euphormio (although keys appended to editions of the Argenis
soon oversimplified the matter in the same way). On one level, the story
represents the religious and political conflicts in France (~ Sicily) under
Henry III (~ Meleander) as well as the rise of the Bourbons under
Henry IV (~ Poliarchus) – this is why the attention of the dedicatee,
Louis XIII, Henry IV’s son, is drawn to his similarity with Poliarchus. But
Meleander and Poliarchus are far from accurate historical depictions of
Henry III and Henry IV; they are just as much ‘types’, representing certain
kinds of rulers and the problems they face, and there is a good deal of pure
fiction in them. The same holds true for Lycogenes, a Sicilian nobleman
who leads a revolt, and who may be identified with the duc de Guise, the
leader of the Catholic league and opponent of Henry III, but who also
11
Edition and English translation in Riley and Pritchard Huber 2004.
328 stefan tilg
represents all rebellious noblemen; or for Queen Hyanisbe of Mauritania
and King Radirobanes of Sardinia, who bear some traits of Queen
Elizabeth I of England and Philip II of Spain (Radirobanes’ attack on
Mauritania reflects the attack of the Spanish armada on England in 1588),
although this is never made explicit and the analogy cannot be taken too
far. Argenis herself is not inspired by any historical person at all. It has
been persuasively argued that her name is an anagram of the Latin word
regina (‘queen’) with an –s added to make it look like a Greek ending in
–is, suggesting both the name of a girl (such as Phyllis or Lycoris) and the
title of an epic work (such as Aeneis or Thebais).12 Argenis, then, stands
for royal power as such, and whoever marries her will rule – one might
compare the allegorical figure of Marianne, the national emblem of post-
revolutionary France.
The similarities in allegorical technique with the Euphormio are obvious,
but there are also significant points of innovation. Argenis – like all subse-
quent Latin romantic novels – has a third-person narrator and the lack of a
first-person satirical voice creates a tighter fictional fabric. This greater
coherence can also be related to classical models: while the satirical novel
looks to Petronius’ highly episodic first-person narrative of the Satyrica, the
romantic novel follows the more coherent third-person stories of the Greek
love novels, especially Heliodorus’ Aethiopica, first edited in 1534 and read in
numerous translations ever since. The form of the Argenis and later Latin
romance is still prosimetric and there are still theoretical discourses inserted
in the plot – for instance at 4.18, where we find a discussion between
Poliarchus and Queen Hyanisbe about the need to ask parliament to levy
taxes (a clear allusion to a peculiarity of the English parliamentary mon-
archy). But both verse passages and theoretical discourses are grounded
firmly in the story, for example when verse is read out by a character (instead
of coming from a satirical voice which is as it were ‘off-camera’).
The Argenis remains erudite and displays its classical learning, but less
obtrusively so than the Euphormio, and its Latinity, modelled particularly
on Livy,13 is more standard. All this shifts focus onto the story, raising
its interest and verisimilitude. In fact, Barclay deploys the whole repertoire
of narrative devices to absorb the reader, starting from the beginning
in medias res:
Nondum orbis adoraverat Romam, nondum Oceanus decesserat Tibri,
cum ad oram [. . .] ingentis speciei iuvenem peregrina navis exposuit [. . .]

12 13
IJsewijn 1983: 7–8. Riley and Pritchard Huber 2004: 42.
 Longer Prose Fiction 329
insuetus navigii malis procubuerat in arenam quaerebatque circumactum
pelagi erroribus caput sopore componere, cum acutissimus clamor, primum
quiescentis mentem implacida imagine confundens, mox propius advolutus
somni otium horrore submovit.
The world had not as yet bowed to the Roman sceptre, nor the wide ocean
stooped to the Tiber, when a young man of excellent feature was landed
[. . .] by a foreign ship [. . .] Not accustomed to the sea’s tyranny, he lay
down on the shore, desiring to refresh his weather beaten head by sleep,
when a shrill noise first disturbed his restful mind with unquiet fancies, and
then, as it approached, quite broke off his sleep with horror.
Tension builds further when the stranger sees a damsel in distress running
out of the woods and witnesses a fight between Poliarchus and a number of
villains. As in Heliodorus (who provided the model for the beginning with a
mysterious scene on the seashore) or in modern detective fiction, the
identity of the characters and the meaning of the plot is only gradually
unveiled – the full circumstances of this stranger, Archombrotus, are
revealed only in the last book of the Argenis. Further narrative devices to
keep readers on their toes include inserted tales, flashbacks and recognitions.
In combination with the historical allegory, Barclay thus created a new kind
of historical fiction, which he allows one of his own characters to describe.
Nicopompus, a poet at Meleander’s Sicilian court, describes Barclay’s own
poetics when he talks about the ‘stately fable in the manner of a history’
which he is going to write (2.14.5, Grandem fabulam historiae instar ornabo).
The success of this formula was phenomenal. With more than a
hundred editions and translations into more than a dozen languages, the
Argenis was one of the absolute bestsellers of the early modern period.14
It even prompted three sequels by other authors. The last of these, Gabriel
Bugnot’s Latin Archombrotus et Theopompus of 1669, updated the political
allegory for the time of Louis XIV and the dauphin. The Argenis was
erudite enough to appeal to the learned, but it was also the first romance
that politicians and courtiers could read without feeling guilty. It became
mandatory reading for the elegant statesman, and its success among this
group is perhaps best illustrated by the anecdote that Cardinal Richelieu
consulted the Argenis constantly as a handbook of statesmanship and that
it thus contributed to the rise of France as the dominant European
superpower in the seventeenth century.15

14
See Schmid 1904: 3–128 for a detailed description of all editions and translations; for a summary see
Riley and Pritchard Huber 2004: 51–8.
15
The origin of this anecdote is the Life of Barclay appended to Gabriel Bugnot’s 1659 edition of the
Argenis (page 4 of the unpaged Life).
330 stefan tilg
But as an exciting romance the Argenis appealed equally to a less political
and less learned readership, and this possibility of dual reception remained
a characteristic of the genre. The next large-scale example was Claude
Barthélemy Morisot’s Peruviana (‘Peruvian Story’, 1644/5), which deals
with recent French history, starring Henry IV and his wife Marie de
Médicis as well as their sons, Louis XIII and Gaston d’Orléans
(the dedicatee of the work).16 The intricate story in five books employs
Peruvian names in a fashionable Peruvian Inca setting to stand for the
French royal family. In this case, the allegory is doubled by the addition of
a conclusion, in which the story is further explained as a metaphor for the
alchemical quest for the philosopher’s stone (personified in Louis XIV).17
Another major example is Anton Wilhelm Ertl’s Austriana Regina Arabiae
(‘Austriana, Queen of Arabia’, 1687), a sort of Habsburg reaction against
French dominance in the fictional propaganda wars of the seventeenth
century, published (not coincidentally) soon after the defeat of the French-
supported Turks in the Battle of Vienna in 1683.18 The last significant neo-
Latin romance – and indeed the last major neo-Latin novel of any kind – is
the Argonautica (‘Stories of the Argonauts’, 1778) by the Hungarian
member of the Piarist order András Dugonics.19 This work is a very free
adaptation of the myth of the Argonauts and the love of Jason and Medea,
which here ends at the moment of Jason’s triumphal conquest of the
Golden Fleece. In the subtle allegory of the story, the conflicts
between Colchians and Scythians seem to reflect tensions between the
ruling Habsburg dynasty and the Hungarian nobility, with Medea and
the Fleece representing political power. To understand the late date of the
Argonautica one has to consider that Hungarian literature at the time was
bilingual, just as was Western European literature in much of the seven-
teenth century. In fact, the Latin Argonautica was one of the first ‘serious’
and learned novels in Hungary, and it made an important contribution to
the development of Hungarian prose fiction.

Major Strand C: The Utopian Novel

The utopian strand of longer neo-Latin prose fiction begins with Thomas
More’s celebrated Utopia of 1516.20 This work lent the whole genre its

16
The influential French lawyer, Morisot (1592–1661), is another key figure in the reception of
Barclay’s novels; apart from the Peruviana, he also wrote the first continuation of the Euphormio
(see above).
17 18 19
Maillard 1978. Tilg 2012. Tilg 2013.
20
Edition and English translation in Surtz and Hexter 1965. See also Chapter 17 of this volume.
 Longer Prose Fiction 331
name, derived from Greek ou (‘not’) and topos (‘place’) – hence ‘nowhere-
land’. Inspired by Plato’s Republic and imitating both its dialogue setting
and its focus on political theory, the Utopia may be called a philosophical
and political dialogue rather than a novel. Nonetheless, its basic idea of
reporting a fictional journey to a hitherto unknown, imaginary island state
(here playfully named Utopia) lies at the heart of later utopian literature.21
There is little plot in this and similar works, but detailed descriptions of
the people, customs and institutions of the newly discovered land which
are in stark contrast to normal European conditions at the time – Utopia,
for example, seems like a large commune in which people do not have
individual property and promote national statehood throughout. The best-
known such neo-Latin Utopias after More are Tommaso Campanella’s
Civitas Solis (‘The City of the Sun’, written in 1602 in Italian, translated
into Latin by the author himself 1612–20, and edited in this version 1623)
and Francis Bacon’s fragment Nova Atlantis (‘New Atlantis’, written in
1624 in English, soon translated into Latin by the author himself and
edited in this version in 1627). Add to this important, but less-known,
representatives like Caspar Stiblinus’ De republica Eudaemonensium
(‘On the Republic of the People of Eudaemon’, 1555), Johann Valentin
Andreae’s Christianopolis (‘The Christian City’, 1616) or Antoine Legrand’s
Sycdromedia (1669; the title refers to the name of the utopian country
described, derived from its king, Scydromedus). All these and other
examples are prose fiction in that they talk about fictional journeys and
countries. But their lack of plot and their emphasis on politics, society and
institutions make them a rather abstract kind of fiction, between literature
and theory. For this reason they receive but summary discussion in
the present chapter. Utopian fiction in a more concrete sense only comes
into being when it mixes with the strands of the satirical and the romantic
novel discussed above.
The best example of romantic utopian fiction is the Nova Solyma
(‘New Jerusalem’, 1648), written by the English lawyer and politician
Samuel Gott.22 Inspired by millenarian beliefs about the eventual conver-
sion of the Jews to Christianity, Gott’s setting is a Christian city built on
the site of old Jerusalem. His heroes are two students from Cambridge,
who visit New Jerusalem and are involved in an elaborate plot of six books,
packed with descriptions of local customs, romantic affairs and discussions

21
Generally on neo-Latin Utopias see Kytzler 1982 and, very briefly, IJsewijn and Sacré 1998: 253–4.
22
See esp. Patrick 1977 and Morrish 2003; an English translation can be found in Begley 1902 – note
that Begley’s attribution of the Nova Solyma to John Milton has long been obsolete.
332 stefan tilg
about education, philosophy, theology and other subjects. Although Gott’s
overarching purpose is educational and moralizing, he unabashedly uses an
exciting and colourful narrative to drive home his message.
As far as the satirical novel is concerned, there is a general parallel with the
Utopias in the presence of a first-person narrator who visits a strange world
and reports what he has seen there. While this world is normally an ideal
world in the Utopias, Joseph Hall’s satirical if almost plotless Mundus alter et
idem (1605) illustrates how easily the form can be turned into a dystopia –
the normal setting of satirical novels. An example of a fully fledged satirical
utopian novel is Gian Vittorio Rossi’s Eudemia of 1637.23 Its pseudo-
historical scene is set by two conspirators against the Roman emperor
Tiberius, who have to flee from Rome and are driven by storms to an
unexplored island called Eudemia (‘the land of the good people’) off the
Mauritanian cost. They are received by fellow Romans who had previously
come to this island and established their own society, from which – in actual
fact – we learn much about characters and customs in the Barberinian Rome
of Rossi’s own day. By involving his heroes in the discussions and activities
of the Eudemians, Rossi presents us with a fictional and humorous mirror of
his own life as a humanist and friend of the Roman elites.
The most accomplished and enjoyable neo-Latin combination of
utopian and satirical elements, however, is the Nicolai Klimii iter sub-
terraneum (‘Niels Klim’s Underground Travels’, 1741), penned by the
father of Danish and Norwegian literature, Ludvig Holberg.24 The hero
of this novel is a bored recent graduate, Niels Klim, who explores a cave
near Bergen, falls into it and finds himself in a strange subterranean
world – Holberg here exploits the various Hollow Earth theories dis-
cussed in contemporaneous science.25 It turns out that the inside of the
earth is inhabited by a number of peoples, some utopian, some dysto-
pian. Much of the satire is based on the fact that either Klim himself or
the societies he visits are out of touch with the enlightened ideas which
Holberg himself propagated. Klim first arrives at a planet inhabited by
walking and speaking trees who move and think slowly but all the more
wisely and considerately. Their enlightened monarchy is characterized by
ideals like gender equality, tolerance and freedom of ideas – a stark
contrast to Holberg’s own experiences under the repressive regime of

23
There is no modern edition and no translation; for some helpful remarks see IJsewijn 1999.
24
Edition of Latin text (with Danish translation and notes) by Kragelund 1970; for an English
translation see McNelis 2004; for studies e.g. Jones 1980, Peters 1986 and Skovgaard-Petersen
2013.
25
E.g. Standish 2006.
 Longer Prose Fiction 333
the pietist king Christian VI of Denmark and Norway. Elsewhere, Klim
encounters a land of apes who act and speak like humans and are the
exact opposite of the trees: rushed, vain and easily impressed by fads. To
advance in their esteem, Klim at one point introduces them – and in
particular their ‘syndicus’, a term used for what we might call the
president of the senate – to the European fashion of wearing periwigs.
This passage is worth quoting because it illustrates Holberg’s lively
narrative, his talent for situation comedy and his inventiveness in lan-
guage. Here he introduces a new word into Latin (perucca, ‘periwig’,
from the French perruque) and is called by the name the apes have given
him in their language, Kakidoran, translated earlier in the novel as
‘stupid’ and ‘lethargic’ – after all, Klim seems sluggish to the glib apes.
None of this is obscure, however, and although there is a good deal of
classical learning in the novel, it can be read easily without understanding
every allusion (10.35–6):
Comparatis igitur lanis caprinis effinxi peruccam, capiti meo convenien
tem, ac ita ornatus, Syndico me sistebam. Obstupescens ille ad novum et
insolitum phaenomenon, quid rei esset, rogat, moxque capiti meo ademp
tam, suo imponit, ad speculum properans, ut se ipsum eo ornatu intuer
etur. Tantum sibi ipsi tunc, cum novo isto capitis tegmento, placuit, ut
prae gaudio alte exclamaverit: Diis proximus sum! Coniugem suam mox
arcessivit, ut gaudii sui participem faceret. Illa non minori laetitia exsul
tans, maritum amplexa, testatur, nil lepidum magis, ac gratum oculis suis
fuisse, cui sententiae tota etiam familia suffragatur. Tunc ad me conversus
Syndicus: ‘Si istud tuum commentum’, inquit, ‘o Kakidoran! Senatui
aeque arriserit ac nobis, summos in nostra re publica honores tibi polliceri
poteris.’
I procured some goat’s hair, and made a periwig fitted to my own head,
and thus adorned, I appeared before the president. Startled at so new and
unusual an appearance, he asked me what it was, and immediately
snatching it from my head he put it upon his own and ran to the glass
to survey himself. He was so pleased to see himself in that novel headgear
that he burst into an ecstasy of pleasure, crying ‘I’m god like’ and
forthwith sent for his wife to join with him in his joy. Her wonder was
equal to his, and embracing her husband, she vowed she never saw
anything so charming, and the whole family was of the same opinion.
The president then turning towards me ‘My dear Kakidoran’ says he ‘if
this invention of yours should take with the senate as it does with me, you
may promise yourself everything in our state.’

The Iter subterraneum was an immediate success. By the end of the eighteenth
century about thirty editions and translations (into French, German, Dutch,
334 stefan tilg
English, Swedish, Russian, Hungarian and Norwegian) had been produced,
and it gave the infant genre of fiction in Danish and Norwegian (which was
very much the same language at that time) a significant boost. The choice of
Latin at a comparatively late date is best explained by the European audience
that Holberg had in mind: he could not have hoped for a similar circulation if
he had written in Danish. Furthermore, there was no respectable tradition of
Danish fiction up to that point – in this regard one may compare Dugonics’
choice of Latin in the Hungary of the 1770s. The reasons for Holberg’s
success are obvious. His utopian/dystopian discussion of enlightened ideas
reflected the zeitgeist (compare, for instance, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels of 1726,
one of Holberg’s avowed models), and his style is witty and engaging.
Moreover, Holberg is one of the most imaginative neo-Latin prose writers,
and he can rightly be called a classic author of fantasy and science fiction:
although any direct influence is unclear, his walking and speaking
trees anticipate Tolkien’s Ents; his human-like society of apes Pierre Boulle’s
Planet of the Apes. More narrowly speaking, Holberg pioneers the soon-to-
flourish genre of subterranean fiction, of which Jules Verne’s Journey to the
Centre of the Earth (1864) is just one famous example.26 For all these reasons,
the dual reception – both learned and popular – discussed above under the
romantic novels, worked also for the satirical and utopian Iter subterraneum.
Its Danish translation made it almost a folk tale in Denmark and Norway,
and the Danish Broadcasting Corporation even adapted it as a three-part TV
mini-series in 1984 (Niels Klims underjordiske rejse).

Minor Strands and Examples of Their Own Kind

The above discussion should not lead us to believe that longer neo-Latin
prose fiction can be fully accounted for by three major strands and their
combinations. There are quite a few examples that do not fall into any of
the categories presented so far, or do so only partially. First of all, there are
a number of works in the tradition of the smaller, not always plot-centred,
fantastic fiction of Lucian (2nd century ce). Lucian’s satirical dialogues,
especially their mockery of classical mythology in works like the Dialogues
of the Gods, are the single most important inspiration for Leon Battista
Alberti’s Momus, written in 1443–50 and first printed in 1520.27 The main

26
Standish 2006.
27
Edition and English translation by Knight and Brown 2003; generally for Lucian’s influence on neo-
Latin writers, esp. of the early Renaissance see Marsh 1998 (with remarks on Momus at various
places).
 Longer Prose Fiction 335
characters of this work are the Olympian gods; its story is driven by the
arch-critic, Momus, the personified god of blame, who travels to and fro
from heaven to earth and exposes the follies of divine and human life.
Although taking his cue from Lucian, the long and twisted plot of Alberti’s
four books transcends short fiction and can be called the first neo-Latin
(fantasy) novel, even though it remained an isolated experiment at its time.
Perhaps, however, Momus and its rogue main character served as a model –
through a Spanish translation by Agustín de Almazán (El Momo, 1553,
reprinted 1598) – for the tradition of the Spanish picaresque novel started
with the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) and Mateo Alemán’s
Guzman de Alfarache (1599). Lucian’s lasting influence on both short and
long Latin prose fiction – especially of the fantastic and utopian varieties –
is further suggested by Ludvig Holberg’s Iter subterraneum, discussed
above, and by Johannes Kepler’s brief Somnium of 1634, reporting a
journey to the moon and often seen as the birth of the genre of science
fiction.28 Both works are clearly indebted to Lucian’s True Story, the
deliberately incredible report of a fantastic journey in which Lucian mocks
the genre of fanciful travelogues.
Another interesting minor strand is collections of shorter narratives
in a larger frame, such as the Utopia (1640) by German Jesuit Jakob
Bidermann.29 Its six books include about sixty tales of very different
character, from fables to anecdotes to romantic novellas to satirical
sketches. They are tied together by a framing narrative about three friends
who meet in a country house and tell each other stories during two days
and one night – the setting is similar to Boccacio’s Decameron, which
served as one among many other classical and vernacular models. From the
second book onwards, the narratives have a shared setting in the reported
journey of two of the friends to the country Cimmeria, which is also
called Utopia. The name ‘Utopia’ (hence the title of the work) is ironical
and somewhat misleading here, since Cimmeria is not an ideal state, but a
land of idlers, liars, drinkers and criminals; nor is there a focus on the
description of customs and institutions – this Utopia is fully narrative,
and ultimately its name seems only to draw attention to the fictional status
of the journey. The stories in Cimmeria are interwoven in a highly
sophisticated manner via a multitude of digressions and up to four narra-
tives nested within one another.

28
E.g. Christianson 1976.
29
Edition (in fact annotated reprint of the 1640 edition) and German translation by Schuster 1984;
some interpretive approaches in Wimmer 1999.
336 stefan tilg
Bidermann wrote this work as reading material for his pupils in the Jesuit
school, and there is a certain moral point about the vanity of the world
implied. But nowhere is this made explicit, and narrative entertainment
clearly prevails over moral teaching. This is not always true for the Gyges
Gallus (1658) by Zacharie de Lisieux, a French Capuchin who wrote under
the pen name of Petrus Firmianus.30 Its framing story is that of a young
philosopher at the dawn of the French nation in late antiquity. Chancing
upon the tomb of a druid, he finds a ring which makes him invisible (hence
‘Gyges Gallus’, the ‘French Gyges’, after the king of Lydia who owned such
a magic ring in classical legend). Curious about the true character of his
contemporaries, the ring allows him to enter their houses and observe their
private lives without being seen himself. The results of this enquiry are set
out in twenty-nine more or less unrelated chapters, illustrating various vices
like hypocrisy, luxury, gluttony and vanity. Remarkably, Zacharie includes
some social critique – aimed, for instance, at the privileges of the nobility
and the exploitation of farmers – of a sort never found in supporters of royal
absolutism such as Barclay and his followers.
Some neo-Latin prose fiction may best be called novels of ideas. In fact a
large proportion of longer neo-Latin prose fiction and certainly the whole
utopian strain tends towards reflection (I return to this in my conclusion).
But some examples do not fall clearly under any of the categories discussed
so far and are focused very tightly upon a philosophical or religious point.
One such work is the Parergi philosophici speculum (‘Mirror of the
Philosophical Parergon’, 1623) by the Hermetic philosopher Heinrich
Nolle.31 This tells of a young man, Philaretus (the ‘lover of virtue’), whose
quest for truth leads him, via alchemy and Hermes Trismegistus, to the
allegorical fortress of wisdom. More rewarding from a literary point of
view is the Psyche Cretica (1685) by the learned mayor of Regensburg,
Johann Ludwig Prasch.32 Prasch’s novel in three short books is a Christian
allegorical adaptation of the story of Cupid and Psyche at the centre of
Apuleius’ Metamorphoses. Although Christianizing interpretations of this
story, invited by its Platonic allusions, date back as early as Fulgentius’
Mythologiae (c. 500 ce), Prasch’s allegory distinguishes itself because of the

30
Guéry 1912; Wiegand 2013; briefly also IJsewijn and Sacré 1998: 241–2.
31
Kasza 2013. Copies of this book are rare, and there is no modern edition. The only translation
available is in Hungarian (Kasza 2003). Generally on Nolle see Meier-Oeser 2009.
32
Modern edition by Desmet-Goethals 1968 (cf. correction of errata in IJsewijn 1982: 29); a recent
hypertext edition by M. Riley can be found at www.csus.edu/indiv/r/rileymt/Psyche Cretica.html.
There do not seem to be more recent translations than the German one of 1705. For studies see
Tunberg-Morrish 2008 and Gärtner 2013 with references; for Prasch’s poetics see esp. Holm 2001.
 Longer Prose Fiction 337
liberties it takes and its highly literary texture. It is characterized by non-
linear narrative and dense intertextuality with many classical (especially
Virgil) and vernacular authors. Prasch follows Apuleius only loosely; the far
greater part of the Psyche Cretica is Prasch’s own invention. After her
separation from Cupid (Jesus Christ), Psyche (the human soul), is
threatened by Cosmus (the world) and escapes to Athens, where she hides
in a cave. Tracked down by Cosmus again, she is rescued by Theophrastus
(‘the voice of god’). Eventually Cosmus is killed by Cupid. Psyche is
reunited with Cupid in heaven. The consistent religious allegory in this
novel owes much to theoretical considerations about the nature of the
genre of prose fiction, which Johann Ludwig Prasch developed together
with his wife, Susanna. Susanna Prasch wrote a brief poetics of the novel in
1684, in which she dismissed political and erotic affairs and advocated
religious allegory, ideally presented in relatively short and concentrated
novels.33 The Psyche Cretica is very much the practical illustration of
these ideas.
Finally, there is a large and diffuse body of texts that fall between longer
prose fiction and genres like historiography, biography and travel writing.
The blurring of clear distinctions and the range of different approaches
can be illustrated by two particularly intriguing works of the German
Jesuit Johannes Bissel, his Icaria of 1637 and his Argonautica Americana
(‘American Argonauts Stories’) of 1647.34 The Icaria is a personal account
of Bissel’s journey to the Upper Palatinate region of Bavaria amidst the
turmoil of the Thirty Years’ War. The basic structure of a travel narrative is
varied, however, by the prosimetric form and highly literary intertextuality,
the consistent and playful use of fictional names for persons and
places (such as ‘Icaria’, ‘the land of Icarus’ for the Upper Palatinate) in
the manner of a roman-à-clef, and by an explicit reference to Barclay’s
Euphormio in the preface. The approach taken here – and which can often
be seen in similar works of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – is to
graft the entertaining literary form of the satirical or romantic novel on to a
more historical content.
The Argonautica Americana takes a different tack. It is based on the
Spanish travel account Naufragio y peregrinación, written by the adventurer
Pedro Gobeo de Victoria and published in 1610, upon Gobeo’s return to
his native Seville. The work reports Gobeo’s voyage to South America,

33
Prash 1684 (reprinted in Weber 1974: i, 183–228).
34
For the Icaria see esp. Wiegand 1997; for the Argonautica Americana Hill 1970. There are no modern
editions and no translations.
338 stefan tilg
his shipwreck, his arduous journey across the continent to Peru and his
eventual decision to enter the Society of Jesus in Lima. Bissel adapted
this narrative (which he read in a German translation based on a now-lost
Latin version made by Gobeo himself) in a truly literary manner: he
inserted lyrical descriptions of landscapes he probably never saw himself,
changed and added scenes to make the story more consistent and dramatic,
and focused on the psychological development of Gobeo as representing a
parable of the human condition in a hostile environment. All this he
did not do to render the story superficially entertaining – there is no
prosimetrum, no display of classicism (despite the title alluding to the
Argonauts of Greek mythology) and no roman-à-clef – but to achieve
realism and credibility. With these characteristics Bissel’s Argonautica
belongs to the most modern-looking Latin novels of the early modern
period, and in fact the author does what many modern novelists do when
they seek inspiration in true stories, making a more literary and more
general narrative out of them.

Utile et Dulce
In reviewing the material set out above we can note as a general point that
longer neo-Latin prose fiction is seldom purely entertaining and escapist.
It usually attempts to connect with reality in one way or another and to
contribute to contemporaneous discourses in the fields of politics, society
and religion. In this respect, it anticipates the well-known discussions
about the genre and the potential of the novel as a serious literary form
in the eighteenth century. In order to reflect reality, different, but not
mutually exclusive, strategies were developed, for instance the roman-à-clef,
political allegory, the novel of ideas and the literary generalization and
dramatization of historical events. All these strategies remain options in
modern prose fiction,35 and while it would be problematic to construct a
linear ancestry from neo-Latin fiction to the modern novel, it is clear that
longer neo-Latin fiction raised awareness about the novel as a serious
medium. At the same time, all writers of neo-Latin novels knew that their
message also had to entertain – related prefaces are full of considerations
about the famous Horatian link between utility and pleasure. The literary
pleasure in neo-Latin novels may consist of different things: the frequent

35
For current examples of political romans-à-clef cf. e.g. the anonymously published novels Primary
Colors: A Novel of Politics (1996) and O: A Presidential Novel (2011), dealing with Bill Clinton’s and
Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns.
 Longer Prose Fiction 339
prosimetric form, to some extent indebted to the revival of the Menippean
satire in the late sixteenth century;36 particular narrative techniques like the
use of an interesting first or third person narrator; the framing and nesting
of stories; the beginning in medias res, or flashbacks and anticipations of
later events; a web of intertextuality with classical and vernacular texts; the
wide appeal of alluring exotic locations or imaginative fantasy as seen in
many utopian novels. Last but not least, the frequent focus on private
interests appeals to the curiosity and emotions of readers and makes the
stories told and ideas discussed more relevant.

FURTHER READING
For various surveys of longer neo Latin prose fiction see IJsewijn and Sacré 1998:
241 57, Morrish Tunberg 2014 and Riley 2015. Tilg and Walser 2013 is the first
edited volume dedicated to the subject and illustrates the variety and richness of
the material. IJsewijn 1999 provides further information on the satirical novel. For
a number of satirical novels also see De Smet 1996, although De Smet classifies
them as Menippean satires. Kytzler 1982 gives a cursory account of utopian novels.
The introductions of Fleming 1973 and Riley and Pritchard Huber 2004 are good
starting points for studying the satirical and romantic novels.

36
Note, however, that the prosimetrum was known as a pleasing literary form before (IJsewijn 1999:
134) and that it was not limited to satirical fiction afterwards.
 chapter 20

Prose Satire
Joel Relihan

The only two Latin humanist texts that have passed into the Western
canon are Erasmus’ ‘Praise of Folly’ (1509) and More’s Utopia (1516).1 Their
affiliation with Menippean satire is certainly a large part of the reason for
their success. Erasmus, steeped in Lucian as befits his translator, drew
inspiration both from Lucian’s Icaromenippus and from the Greco-Roman
traditions of paradoxography to create a fiction whose didactic purposes are
purposefully left hard to decipher.2 It is folly to insist on unequivocal truth
from Folly. The work is sophisticated, learned, ambiguous: critical while
also self-critical. W. Scott Blanchard makes a nice point, that Folly in
Erasmus, like Vanity in Ecclesiastes and Melancholy in Burton, means
nothing and everything: such texts ‘voice a radical skepticism concerning
the capacity of humans to place any meaningful definitions upon their
experiences of the world’.3 To this extent it operates within the traditions
of classical Menippean satire, even if that tradition was not fully available
to Erasmus.
But when Erasmus needed to defend himself against the controversy
created by the ‘Praise of Folly’, he was pleased in the prefatory material
in later editions to augment his original list of playful authors of
paradoxical encomia who served both as models and as excuse with
the example of Seneca’s Ludus de morte Claudii, ‘A Jest on the Death of
Claudius’ (the punning title Apocolocyntosis, ‘Pumpkinification’, was not
attached to the text until 1557).4 The point that I wish to make is that
Apocolocyntosis has its value in this context as a conservative text: it
justifies a philosopher writing comic fantasy, and its satiric affiliations

1
Branham 2010: 863.
2
Haarberg 1998: 177–243 analyzes the relation of ‘Praise of Folly’ to Menippean satire; 196–7 discusses
the ancient texts, including Boethius, that were known to Erasmus.
3
Blanchard 2007: 124.
4
Erasmus read the Ludus in its editio princeps in 1513, and published ‘Folly’ along with it in the Froben
edition of 1515; see De Smet 1996: 74–5; Haarberg 1998: 196–7.

340
 Prose Satire 341
are asserted to prove that ‘Praise of Folly’ has a laudable social or moral
goal. With this insertion of Seneca, intellectual ambiguities of the
‘Praise of Folly’, the sophistications that continue to secure it a modern
audience, are downplayed in the name of something narrower: namely,
satire more pedantically referenced as social criticism.5
Yet neither Erasmus nor More called his work Menippean,6 and so
Menippean satire, by which I mean the prose satire of this era, cannot be a
generic and interpretive label applied exclusively to the few works that have
labeled themselves as Menippean or Varronian. It is the Senecan satire,
certainly a crucial text in the history and development of the ancient genre,
that draws a bright line in the history of humanist prose satire, placing on
one side Erasmus and More, whose Utopia owes nothing to Seneca and
much to Lucian and to Plato, and on the other the explicitly Menippean
tradition that follows them.7 These latter works, led by Justus Lipsius
in 1581 with his Satyra Menippaea. Somnium. Lusus in nostri aevi criticos,
‘A Menippean Satire. A Dream. A Jest on Our Contemporary Critics’,
analyzed in the crucial study of Ingrid De Smet, are only a thin slice of a
literary movement that both predates and outlives them.8 A consideration
of the origins and destinations of this division gives a clearer picture of the
means and motives of Menippean satire in humanist literature as a whole.
What we have is two Menippean traditions: one whose concerns are
broadly intellectual, born of Lucian and at home in the traditions of
paradoxography; the other broadly social and moral and controversialist,
inspired by Seneca and the traditional concerns of Roman satire.9 There is
overlap of course: paradoxical encomia in their medical aspect (praise of
blindness, fever, gout, etc.) are aligned with the traditions of Roman satire
and the healing powers of the satirist (see now Sari Kivistö’s excellent
study, and her chapter on verse satire in this volume).10 The self-labeled
Menippean satires, inspired by the genre’s mixture of prose and verse, find
the medium appropriate for the criticism of poets and poetry, pedants,

5
Swift, the modern savior of Menippean satire, reverses this in Gulliver’s Travels as he moves from the
more cautious social criticism of Books 1 and 2 to the intellectual and anti-scientific satire of Books 3
and 4.
6
Though Folly does speak of Menippus (48): ‘If you could look down from the Moon, as Menippus
once did . . .’
7
For a good discussion of humanist utopian fiction, which is not the topic of this chapter, see
Morrish Tunberg 2014; also in this volume Chapter 17 (on More’s Utopia) and Chapter 19 on
utopian fiction in general.
8
De Smet 1996: 88–91; edition in Matheeussen and Heesakkers 1980.
9
In Chapter 19 of this volume Stefan Tilg discusses this distinction in terms of Petronian and
Varronian models for prose satire.
10
Kivistö 2009 and Chapter 9 in this volume.
342 joel relihan
poetasters, philologues and bibliomanes of all sorts. But where these
two traditions are most usefully distinguished is in the anthologies that
contain them.

Satiric Anthologies in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

The ‘Praise of Folly’ was quickly packaged with Seneca and with Synesius’
‘Praise of Baldness’ (in the Latin translation of John Free) in the 1515
Froben edition. This formed the nucleus of an anthologizing tradition that
found its vastest expression in the 1619 compilation of Caspar Dornau
(Dornavius), the Amphitheatrum sapientiae Socraticae joco-seriae, ‘The
Amphitheatre of Socratic Seriocomic Wisdom’, now beautifully reprinted
with invaluable aids by Robert Seidel (hereafter, simply Amphithreatrum).11
In the encyclopedic Amphitheatrum, paradoxography grows radically while
Seneca is eliminated; it praises the trivial and the pernicious, finding room
for both Utopia and ‘Folly’. Lipsius’ Somnium, on the other hand, is given
pride of place in a 1655 anthology of related Menippean satires called the
Elegantiores praestantium virorum satyrae, ‘Elegant Satires of Distinguished
Men’, published in two volumes by Jean Maire (hereafter, simply Elegan-
tiores). Here Seneca has been kept, printed along with the Emperor Julian’s
Caesares (itself inspired by Seneca) and Misopogon, ‘The Beard Hater’, and
such descendants of Lipsius as Petrus Cunaeus’ Sardi Venales, ‘Sardinians
on the Slave Block’, Nicolas Rigault’s Funus parasiticum, ‘A Parasite’s
Funeral Rites’, Famiano Strada’s Momus (the name of the god of criticism,
and not to be confused with Alberti’s Momus), and various academic
Somnia, ‘Dream Visions’.12
It is the nature of these two anthologies, and the attitudes toward satire
that each represents, that is my topic here. The history of the humanist
anthology has not yet been written, and this chapter is an appeal to others
to pursue in greater detail what I outline here in broad strokes. But these

11
Seidel 1995.
12
The complete contents: Volume i: Lipsius, Somnium; Cunaeus, Sardi Venales; Julian, Caesares (in
Cunaeus’ free translation, with ancillary materials); Julian, Caesares (with prefatory material, Greek
text, and translation by Cantoclarus); Julian, Misopogon (Greek text and translation by Petrus
Martinius); Seneca, Apocolocyntosis; Petrus Nannius, Somnium and Somnium alterum; Franciscus
Bencius [Benci], Somnium; Volume ii: Rigaltius [Rigault], Funus Parasiticum; Puteanus, Comus;
Castellanus, Convivium Saturnale, ‘A Banquet at the Saturnalia’; Strada, Comus and Academica
prima et secunda; Benningius [Benningh], Satyricon; Fabricius, Pransus paratus, ‘Well Fed and Ready
for Action’ (the title of one of Varro’s ‘Menippean Satires’); Ferrarius, nine prolusiones, ‘Prefatory
Pieces’; Sangenesius, de Parnaso et finitimis locis, libri duo, ‘Two Books on Mt. Parnassus and Its
Environs’.
 Prose Satire 343
broad strokes will serve both to indicate the evolution of the Menippean
genre within the humanist era, and the evolution of the genre by means
of the humanist era, from classical to modern times. A work written under
one inspiration is rethought by its successors; the theory of satire that
informs a given work is necessarily tentative; topical objects give way to
broad, thematic trends; and the cliché of telling the truth with a laugh,
invoked both as a cover when writing fiction and as a hermeneutic
principle, gradually finds its way toward valuing humor as a kind of truth
all its own. How Utopia is read when it is new is not how it is read a
hundred years later.

The Characteristics of Humanist Menippean Satire

and the Medieval Tradition
I have argued at length that the character of Menippus himself is not
much of a guide to the genre that passes under his name.13 Menippus is a
mocker of both the orthodoxies of the learned and the superstitions of the
simple, but can himself be mocked as a charlatan and a fraud. Renaissance
appropriations of Lucian (and not everything that is Lucianic in origin is
Menippean by definition or by classification) are more content to criticize
the culture of their contemporaries than to query their own right to
criticize it. Menippus in Lucian, after all, is a universalist, looking down
from the moon or observing hell and in either case seeing the totality of
human life and human endeavor; Erasmus’ Folly has this sort of vision,
and though we come to appreciate seeing the limitations of Folly the critic,
the critical gaze is directed more outward than inward. Our Latin authors
are quite serious about their own Latinity, and fantasy is the vehicle
for serious aesthetic and social criticism, as it was in Aristophanes’
‘Frogs’, with Dionysus harrowing hell to find a poet worthy to speak to
the Athenian people.
Blanchard in Scholars’ Bedlam makes by way of conclusion the excellent
point that Menippean satire in the Renaissance is not to be thought of so
much as anti-intellectual as anti-systematic, and that in various ages
Menippean satire is revived as a form of attack against dominant intellec-
tual models: early Italian humanism opposes scholasticism; early modern
Swift and Blake use Menippean satire in opposition to science.14 In fact,
Menippean satire has an even earlier history of documenting intellectual
systems in decline. The two crucial texts of the twelfth-century
13 14
Relihan 1996. Blanchard 1995: 166.
344 joel relihan
Renaissance, Bernardus Silvestris’ De cosmographia, ‘A Map of the Uni-
verse’, and Alan of Lille’s De planctu Naturae, ‘The Complaint of Nature’,
arise in the demise of Christian Platonism, as human nature no longer
finds a logical place within the fabric of the universe and so requires the
special providence of theology.15
Medieval Menippean satires – like Silvestris’ De cosmographia – often
employed a mixture of prose and verse, either to suggest an attempt to
encompass the whole of experience, or as a fundamentally destabilizing
literary device.16 Humanist Menippean satire has other uses for verse within
prose: it is deployed more as stylistic embellishment or out of allegiance to a
specific stylistic model (most often Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis); the idea that
the mixture of verse and prose is paradoxical, or polemical, is largely lost, as
is the use of prosimetrum for the writing of autobiography. When prose
and verse are found together in the texts of our era, they represent for their
authors an attempt to show mastery of Latin in all its forms. One work
which stands out in this respect is Puteanus’ Comus, with an elegant ninety-
five catalectic iambic dimeters; more thoroughly prosimetric is the Momus
of Famiano Strada (Momus, sive satira Varroniana, poësi poëtisque cognoscen-
dis accommodata, ‘Momus, or a Varronian Satire Designed for the Recog-
nition of Poetry and Poets’), where poetry is included for its own sake, not
as a marker of a literary genre that thrives on the impropriety of mixing
prose and verse.17 (Modern Menippean satires are not prosimetric, though
they may reserve a space for one heightened poetic experience.18)
The multiplicities of medieval prosimetricality, from saints’ lives to the
Cosmographia of Aethicus Ister, are not each individually and organically
continued into the Latin Renaissance, where Lucian and Seneca lead to a
general starting over. We can nevertheless discern some continuity between
medieval and humanist Menippean satire.19 Most simply, Menippean
satirists mock the idea that words are sufficient to describe what is true,
and because the satirists work in words, theirs is a medium that tends to

15
See Wetherbee 2012: 345–7 for a brief account of the mythology of Bernard’s and Alan’s
prosimetric works.
16
See Dronke 1994 for a discursive account of the varieties, Menippean and non-Menippean, of
medieval prosimetrum; and my review of that book (Relihan 2004). For a consideration of
prosimetrum as a classical phenomenon, see Ziolkowski 1997.
17
Elegantiores ii, 463–501.
18
Cf. Marionetta’s song in Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey (ch. vi); the lovely song of Mr Hilary and the
Reverend Mr Larynx (ch. xi), and the poetry of Jem Casey in Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds.
The modern Latin Menippean satires of Harry Schnur follow a more classical approach (see Porter
2014c).
19
See Haarberg 1998: 210 for the break between medieval and humanist Menippean satire. See also my
‘Prosimetra’, forthcoming.
 Prose Satire 345
collapse in upon itself. The humanist voyages to heaven and to hell, the
immediate successors of Lucian’s Icaromenippus, ‘Menippus the New
Icarus’, and Necyomantia, ‘A Consultation with the Dead’, are in some
sense journeys back to Aristophanes and his ‘Birds’ and ‘Frogs’, works of
inestimable importance in the history of Menippean satire; and Lucian,
himself a student both of Aristophanes and of Plato, allows his Renaissance
imitators and innovators a glimpse through him into a Platonic world in
which words cannot convey ultimate truth, where those who put their faith
in words in their search for perfection find themselves embarrassed.20
Viewed through the lens of Menippean satire, we find that the humanist
enterprise was from its inception self-critical.

Prose Satire and the Encyclopedic Shift

Justus Lipsius’ Somnium (1581) and its descendants – the consciously self-
styled Menippean dream visions of trips to unearthly places where vice and
aesthetic offense are castigated – owe their assumption that Menippean
satire should be political and topical to the example of Seneca’s Apocolo-
cyntosis and its abuse of the emperor Claudius. But this path proved to be a
dead end in humanist literature: the future did not belong to works like
Erasmus’ Julius Exclusus, ‘Pope Julius II Barred from Heaven’ (or Donne’s
Ignatius, His Conclave). Rather, the encyclopedia, the miscellany, the work
of the scholar at play, the journey to the ends of the earth are the forms
that emerge from this era.21
If the verse satirist is concerned with the human being’s role in larger
human society, the prose satirist is more concerned with his place in the
universe. Menippean satires tend to grow large, as Northrop Frye would
say, as more and more attention is given to the world into which human
beings do not fit. The two anthologies of humanist texts that allow us to
chart the growth and fortunes of two particular types of Menippean satire,
the Amphitheatrum and the Elegantiores, each show the triumph of the
universal over the particular, though the processes of their growth and
development differ. The traditions of paradoxography, which begin with

20
One refreshingly Menippean aspect of Alberti’s otherwise ponderous and, frankly, dull Momus is
that the world of Jupiter is itself a source of humor. Jupiter’s wisdom is not absolute. See Robinson
1979: 92–4, for a synopsis; Marsh 1998: 49–50, for an appreciation of Menippean/Icaromenippus
motifs.
21
In fact, this is reflected in modern classical scholarship, which has recently demonstrated that the
very topicality of Seneca’s work places it on the fringes of the prose satire tradition, rather than at its
center. See for example Bonandini 2010 and Relihan 2012 for a review.
346 joel relihan
imitiations of Lucian (‘The Fly’, ‘The Parasite’) in the world of paradoxical
encomia, generate a string of anthologies: the Facetiae Facetiarum
(‘The Wit of Wit’, 1615, itself an anthology of other Facetiae texts), the
Admiranda rerum admirabilium encomia (‘Laudable Encomia of Laudable
Things’, 1666), and the Nugae venales (‘Nonsense for Sale’, 1720).22
The titles of these anthologies stress the serio-comic, the elegant, the
witty. But Dornau’s 1619 Amphitheatrum lies also within this paradoxo-
graphical tradition. It is an encyclopedia, too big to be read in its entirety,
and intended surely as a work of reference. It promises, however, that its
contents offer the reader a way to understand the mysteries of Nature. It
opposes, I would argue, the science of its time, particularly that of the
Bolognese polymath and encyclopedist Ulysses Aldrovandi; it leads imme-
diately to Burton, who publishes in 1621 the first edition of his Anatomy of
Melancholy. Both Burton and Dornau are doctors (Dornau calls himself a
philosopher and a doctor), and both attempt through comic or serio-
comic encyclopedias (that is, Menippean satires) to achieve an under-
standing of the human mind by a consideration of the limitations of the
human body.23
An anthology of curiosities, the Amphitheatrum is itself the product and
benefactor of quite a few other such comic anthologies.24 It promises on its
ornate title page a new view of wisdom: that is, a public display of wisdom
that is Socratic and serio-comic, derived from authors ancient and modern,
taking the form of both speeches of praise (encomia) and essays (commentaria)
in two large categories, each the subject of one of its two large divisions:
things trivial and things damnable. It is a useful work, designed to teach the
mysteries of nature as well as wisdom, virtue and delight in both public and
private spheres (opus ad mysteria naturae discenda, ad omnem amœnitatem,
sapientiam, uirtutem, publice priuatimque utilissimum). The first book of
trivialities begins with the Hellenistic Greek ‘The Battle of the Frogs and
Mice’ and proceeds through six hundred double-columned pages devoted to
the praise of animals (texts are mostly in Latin, though there is some
German) before it reaches a final two hundred and fifty wide-ranging pages
of praise of cheese, beer, shadows, something, nothing, anything, everything,

22
Partial lists of contents of these volumes, and of the Amphitheatrum as well, may be found in an
appendix to Kivistö 2009.
23
König 2012: 266–7, makes the nice point that Bakhtin’s association of grotesque consumption with
the carnivalesque overlooks how ‘the grotesque physicality of the human body can also produce a
sense of horror and mystery’.
24
Seidel’s 1995 reprint of Dornau has invaluable introductory material detailing all of its contents and
indicating the anthologies in which individual pieces may be found.
 Prose Satire 347
no one, the country life, the solitary life, academic hazing rituals and finally
More’s Utopia, which comes as a bit of a surprise. It has pride of place,
coming at the end of the book, at once the largest and the most characteristic
piece, a massive praise of No Place.25
The second book consists of three hundred pages devoted to the praise
of morally corrupting things, beginning with ancient authors (Isocrates’
‘Praise of Helen’ and ‘Praise of Busiris’) and then an amalgam of ancient
and modern authors in praise of Bacchus and drunkenness, Nero, Julian,
the Parasite (Lucian is represented by ‘The Fly’ and ‘The Lawsuit of Sigma
against Tau’ in Volume i, and ‘The Parasite’ and ‘The Praise of Gout’ in
Volume ii). Erasmus’ ‘Praise of Folly’ comes at about the mid-way point,
followed by a series of paradoxographical pieces (in praise of fever, gout,
blindness, war, lying, envy, old age and death).26 The two most important
humanist Menippean texts – those of More and Erasmus – have therefore
been apportioned into their separate sections, subjugated by the antholo-
gizing process to serve a new function as constituent parts of a way to
understand the mysteries of nature. A series of contemplations of nothing,
of the values of nothings, of paradoxographies designed to show the
littleness of people ends up defining human nature in a new and scientific
way. Anthologizing is decontextualizing, and offers new contexts. Erasmus’
‘Praise of Folly’ is about human nature; but in Dornau, a hundred years
later, that work is only part of a larger project that shows the complexities
of the human experience by putting it under a microscope (not to say
anatomy). The anthology effectively ends the endeavor, and coincides with
the rise of a scientific assertion of the value of minutiae; but in humanist
Menippean satire, the rhetorical examination of minutiae is sufficient to
redefine the human’s role in the brave new world.
What I think no one has seen is that Dornau is himself a Menippean
author, that the Amphitheater is a Menippean satire, an ironic encyclopedia
of counter-wisdom, and it stands in contrast to the encyclopedic compil-
ations of Ulysses Aldrovandi (1522–1605).27 Aldrovandi represents a non-
rhetorical, non-ironic program: a knowledge of the minutiae of the world
equals a knowledge of the world as a whole. Aldrovandi as an academic

25
The first items in Molnar’s Lusus poetici excellentium aliquot ingenorium . . . (‘Poetic Diversions of
Certain Outstanding Talents’, Hanau, 1614) include three works on Nemo/No One (Ulrich von
Hutten, Theodorus Marcilius, Johannes Huldrichius) and two on Nihil/Nothing (Jean Passerat and
Anonymous). The last of these, unfortunately, does not appear in the Amphitheatrum.
26
Kivistö 2009.
27
One could contrast this to Byzantine encyclopedism, which is in the service of orthodoxy. See Van
Deun and Macé 2011 and Marciniak 2013.
348 joel relihan
phenomenon can be glimpsed behind Dornau’s text (he is quoted thirty-
three times, more often than any other author, though these passages are
relatively brief) as an example of the sort of philosophus gloriosus that
Menippean satire typically mocks: you can’t lay out the world in order;
you can’t pigeonhole the world and assign everything to its proper
category; truth lies rather in the contemplation of the inability of human
beings to be so categorizable. It is not that Dornau in any way deforms
or misquotes Aldrovandi; rather, the satiric effect lies in the repackaging of
Aldrovandi’s encyclopedic pedantry – which was already beginning to
seem dated – as a collection of encomia.
It may come as a surprise that Dornau’s first volume (i.751–6) contains a
work by the scientist and astronomer Johannes Kepler: ‘The Six-Sided
Snowflake’ (De Nive Sexangula), wedged between encomia of Nihil and
some elaborate pieces on goat’s wool (a proverbial item of no value) on one
side and a series of pieces ‘In Praise of No One’ on the other (including
Ulrich von Hutten’s Nemo; the Lusus de Nemine of one Theodorus
Marcilius; and Heinrich Götting’s German verse satire Niemandt).28 This
shows Dornau at his most contemporary: ‘Snowflake’ was published at
Frankfurt/Main in 1611. Kepler, who knew Lucian well and put him to
good use in his scientific fantasy Somnium, in general finds the universe as
opened up by the telescope and by Menippus’ flights a liberating place, full
of good angles from which to ask good questions.29 In ‘Snowflake’, it is
more the microscopic view that pleases him, but in his own way he
embodies a new sort of diptych in these Menippean writings, a telescopic
and a microscopic view.30 Kepler the scientist finds a place in Amphithea-
trum that is quite distinct from Aldrovandi’s.

Anthologies and Satiric Decontextualization

Even those Menippean works which, like Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis, are
strongly and specifically topical and political in their satirical force are
transformed by anthologization. The Elegantiores praestantium virorum
satyrae documents the decontextualization of these satires; simply, the
more they are collected, the smaller is the interest in their original focus.

28
These were taken from Molnar’s compilation of 1614. See above, n. 25.
29
For the complicated history of the Somnium see Rosen 1967: xvii–xxiii. For Kepler’s knowledge of
Lucian, see Pantin 2007.
30
A fairly reliable English translation of ‘Snowflake’ is given by Jacques Bromberg in Gingerich et al.
2010: 23–113. The modern Menippean fascination with Renaissance science and the microscopic
view is in evidence in Klonsky 1974.
 Prose Satire 349
Before considering the Elegantiores per se, consider the examples of
Daniel Heinsius and Nicolas Rigault. Heinsius published his Menippean
satire Hercules tuam fidem (‘Hercules, Help!’) in 1608; by 1609 it was in a
fourth edition. Its object is Gaspar Scioppius, vilified as a sponger and
parasite; his crime was his attack on Joseph Scaliger, the Scaliger hypobo-
limaeus (‘Scaliger the Bastard’). From the first edition, Heinsius’ satire
had been accompanied by a satirical biography of Scioppius by Rutgersius,
the same man who allowed Scaliger’s self-defense, the Fabulae burdoniae
confutatio (‘The Refutation of the Fiction of Scaliger the Mule’), to appear
under his own initials; from the third edition on, Rutgersius’ Confutatio
was printed with the Hercules tuam fidem. The fourth edition, improved
and expanded, then included a second Menippean satire by Heinsius,
the Virgula divina (‘The Magic Wand’), in which (following the example
of the Apocolocyntosis) Scioppius’ father appears in heaven for apotheosis,
but is rejected. In other words, later editions offer not a single text, but
an anthology of Scaliger and Scioppius texts, their topicality preserved,
augmented, and insisted upon.31 But this topicality has a shelf life: all of
this happens in the space of a year.
Twelve years later, in 1621, Heinsius wrote the Menippean Cras credo,
hodie nihil (‘I’ll Believe You Tomorrow, But Not Today’). It is a dream
vision of a trip to the moon and then via comet to the Epicurean
intermundia; he hears what his detractors say about him, and one of them
turns into an ass so that the narrator may ride on him. The moral, cautious
and unsurprising, is against excess in learning.32 Heinsius, a notorious
reviser of his own works, putting out new and newer, large and larger
editions of his Orations and his Elegies, produced in 1629 a third edition of
his Laus asini (’In Praise of the Ass’) (first edition 1623).33 Here, the mock
encomium, now grown to 264 pages, has become the leading piece in his
own miscellaneous anthology: it is followed by the Cras credo; the An et
qualis viro literato sit ducenda uxor (‘Should a Philologue Marry, and, If So,
Whom?’); the Laus pediculi, (‘Praise of the Louse’);34 De poetarum ineptiis,
et saeculi vitio (‘On the Insipidities of the Poets, and the Faults of Our
Era’); a synopsis of ‘The Battle of the Frogs and Mice’; and various epistles.
There is no Heinsius in the Elegantiores, and there are no Scioppius texts in
the Laus Asini. The man who could have made an anthology of his own

31
The Scioppius texts are the subject of a fascinating and detailed chapter in De Smet 1996: 151–93.
They still await a critical edition and translation.
32
I treat this more fully in Relihan 1996: 268–70.
33
See Chomarat 1997 for a discussion of ass-literature in Erasmus, Passerat and Heinsius.
34
An augmented version (pp. 385–400) of what is to be found in Amphitheatrum i.78–80.
350 joel relihan
Menippean satires made instead a miscellany with one Menippean satire
and one huge mock encomium. And as he says at the end of this table of
contents, Omnia hac editione ita aucta et interpolata, ut alia videri possint
(‘Everything in this edition has been so supplemented and so touched up
that it may seem other than what it was’). While the Scioppius texts
remained frozen in 1609, Heinsius moved on to generalities.
Nicolas Rigault’s Funus parasiticum has a similarly complex publication
history. A self-styled Menippean satire, the title of the first edition (1596)
is clearly modeled on Lipsius’ Somnium, and so Rigault steps forward as
Lipsius’ first follower: Satyra Menippaea. Somnium; Biberii curculionis para-
siti mortualia ad ritum prisci funeris (‘A Menippean Satire. A Dream; the Last
Rites of Biberius Curculio the Parasite, Done in Ancient Funeral Trad-
ition’). In the 1599 edition the generic label (Satyra Menippaea) and the
Lipsian short title (Somnium) are dropped; in the 1601 reprint the short title
reappears, but the Menippean label does not.35 The Funus was originally two
separate pieces; when the Asinus sive de scaturigine onocrenes (‘The Ass, or
The Bubbling Waters of the Donkey’s Spring’), also of 1596, was added to
the beginning of the original Somnium, the combination of the two (pub-
lished in 1599) saw the removal of some of the more obvious homages to
Lipsius’ Somnium; simultaneously, an encounter with Lucian and Apuleius
was added. After its peak of popularity, the Funus was repeatedly antholo-
gized: in the four-satire collection of 1620, Quattuor clarissimorum virorum
satyrae (‘Four Satires of Most Illustrious Men’) along with Lipsius, Cunaeus
and Julian’s Caesars; in the Elegantiores of 1655, where it begins Volume ii
(Lipsius, Cunaeus and Julian begin Volume i); and in the Epulum para-
siticum (‘The Parasite’s Banquet’) of 1665, a collection of invectives against
Pierre de Montmaur. In the Paris edition of 1601, the Funus is augmented by
three appendixes on parasites (the sources are Julian the Apostate, Rigault
himself, and an anecdote of Libanius); but in 1636, the Funus itself becomes
an appendix to Johann Kirchmann’s revised and expanded four books on
Roman funerary practice (first edition 1605), included as a brief overview of
the whole ritual. The political nature of the piece could be downplayed, in
other words, and the work promoted as a didactic text.36
The examples of Heinsius and Rigault prepare us for understanding the
Elegantiores compilation. Its introduction, delivered by the personified

35
De Smet 1996: 117–50 devotes a chapter to Rigault, the generic affiliations of the Funus and its
political aims. She identifies the political target of the piece as the court of Henry III, last of the
Valois kings of France.
36
De Smet 1996: 148–9.
 Prose Satire 351
Title itself, implies that the contents of the work would be better if less
political, if more miscellaneous, if more literary. The talk here is mostly
of Greek satyra vs. Roman satira, which should seem quite unnecessary
after Casaubon’s 1605 De satyrica graecorum poesi & romanorum satira libri
duo (‘Two Books on Greek Satyr Poetry and Roman Satire’), but which
is here made comic by reference to a battle between Greeks with their
‘Y’-shaped sticks (this is the Pythagorean symbol) and the Romans with
their ‘I’-shaped spears. One needs to take sides, and the Title would have
preferred to be Roman (satirae, in other words) but the editor thought
otherwise.37 Playful titles are a long-standing Menippean tradition, but a
title that is dissatisfied with itself is a pleasant innovation.
What the Title says is worth excerpting at length, because of the way in
which the history of satire and Menippean satire, ancient and modern, is
so truncated. Where is Lucian?38 Why so much concern with spelling?
Why the insistence on satire as miscellany? Satire, says the Title, is a
Roman thing, reflecting fullness, abundance and elegance. The Title
prefers satira, the more antique Roman term; Varro’s title ‘Menippean
Satires’ does not label a Roman thing as Greek but puts a Roman stamp on
yet another foreign monument imported into Rome. But the Title does
not get all that it wants:

Secuti Varronem postgeniti elegantia doctrinarum praestantes viri, quorum

opuscula hoc libello continentur, auctores fuerunt, ut mihi proprium magis
fieret nomen, Satyrae elegantiores praestantium virorum, parum sollicito
Typographo pro Romana an Graeca, Graeco Romana, an Romano Graeca
haberer, qui id sibi negotii credidit solum dari, ut quam plurimos conjun
geret in unum syntagma, à quo tamen exemptum optassem mei nominis
ergo quendam Caerite cera dignum. Imò maluissem solummodo exhibitos,
qui rem literariam tractant. Aliter visum illi, qui, ut monui, junxit. Singulos
ad partes vocarem, et contra ineptos Aristarchos pro se liberaliter equidem
edissere juberem, libereque in patria libertatis, nisi et scirem patrocinio eos
non indigere, et confiderem expectationem meam hic superandam à can
dore candidorum. Versa pagella vides cunctos miscellè et per Saturam verè
oblatos; licet, sine ulla gratiae, à qua Saturae honos, jactura, potuisset
temporum ordo, quo scripserunt, observari: quod demum post absolutum
Senecae ludum fieri coepit. Aspice; inspice; fruere; vale. Si te faventem
Typographus experiatur, offeret mox quoque Satiras elegantiores τῶν
ἀνωνύμων, neque tamen minus praestantium, virorum.

37
De Smet 1996: 59 states that Jean Maire himself was responsible for the Title’s introductory remarks.
38
De Smet 1996: 56 remarks that ‘Lucian’s writings are not at all prominent in any of the humanists’
discussions of ancient Menippean satire’.
352 joel relihan
Then there followed in his footsteps those who came after Varro, outstanding
for the elegance of their learning, they whose works are contained in this
book, and they were the authorities that my name would be more appropri
ate to me as Satyrae elegantiores praestantium virorum, seeing that the typeset
ter is not too worried whether I be considered Roman or Greek, Greco
Roman or Romano Greek, as he thought that the only job assigned to him
was to bind as many works together into one collection as possible. All the
same, I would still have hoped that there be left out of this collection, for the
sake of my name, a certain one worthy of the wax of Caere.39 In fact, I would
have preferred that only those authors be included who deal in literary topics.
But, as I said, the man who bound them all together thought otherwise.
I would now call on these individual authors to take sides, and would urge
them to speak against these incompetent critics on their own behalf, freely
and as befits free citizens in a free country, were it not for the fact that I also
know that they do not lack for patronage, and that I am confident that my
own expectations would here be exceeded by the candor of the candid. On
the next page you will see them all presented in a jumble and truly per
Saturam, although, granted, the chronological order in which they wrote
could have been preserved without any loss of the charm from which Satura
has her honour; this finally begins to happen after Seneca’s ludus has been
taken care of. Look; investigate; enjoy; farewell. Should the typesetter find
you amenable, he will soon offer as well the Elegant Satires of Anonymous,
though no less outstanding, Men.40 (my translation)
The Elegantiores disdains the controversialist literature that is bound up
within it (Rigault), overlooks Heinsius and the Scioppius invectives, wishes
Julian were gone, and speaks in terms of literary miscellany, eager only to
defend its Romanness against the encroachment of the Greek satyra-with-a-y.
These satires do not prize their topicality. And if Menippean satire is
thought of as narrative, we can see that Seneca is not prized for narrative
either. In the seventeenth century, it is the rediscovery of Petronius that is
the real impetus to narrative experiment.

Prolalia and Praelectio from Vives to Borges

At the end of the first volume of the Elegantiores satyrae come two
academic Somnia by Petrus Nannius. The first, subtitled Paralipomena

39
The reference is to Horace, Epistles 1.6.62; that is, one who should be struck from the citizenship
rolls. I presume that the title objects to the presence of Julian’s Caesars and Misopogon, given Julian’s
status as the Apostate. Cunaeus’ Encomium of Julian is found in Amphitheatrum ii, 102–3, the book
of damnable topics, right after Cardano’s Encomium of Nero. For the history of Julian’s Caesares in
the humanist era, see Smith 2012.
40
That is, the hope is that the sequel will be called Satirae. This would have been on the model of the
‘Letters of Anonymous Men’; no such book ever appeared.
 Prose Satire 353
Vergilii, res inferae à poëta relictae (‘What Virgil Passed Over: Infernal
Matters the Poet Left Behind’), was written last (1545), and served to
entertain his students while they were working through Aeneid vi. (How
was it that Virgil knew more than Homer did about the underworld?) The
second, probably from 1543, is subtitled In Lib. ii Lucretii praefatio
(‘Preface to the Second Book of Lucretius’). The first has more of moral
outrage, directed toward the dissolute life of students; the second, ‘clearly
meant as a divertimento’, is designed to keep his students amused and in
class as he takes them through the opening books of Lucretius.41 Puteanus,
who is responsible for their being called somnia, calls the first one a satire in
his preface to it; but the author himself, as Dirk Sacré points out,42 does
not quite know how to label his own work when he completes it:
Jam finita ista commentatione, quam addam coronidem mecum subdubito.
Subjiciam plaudite? non est comoedia. Subjiciam dixi? non est oratio.
Dicam nugatus sum? sed adsunt quaedam gravia. Jam scio, quid subjicere
debeam. Dicam enim Miscellanea mea jam absolvi.
Ite domum pasti, si quis pudor, ite juvenci (Verg. Ecl. 7.44)
Now that I’ve finished my account, I have my doubts as to what signature
to add. Plaudite? It’s not a comedy. Dixi? It’s not an oration. Nugatus sum?
But there are serious elements within it. Now I know what to add: I’ll say
‘Now I have brought my Miscellanies to a conclusion.’
Now you’re stuffed full. Go home, my cattle, go, if you have any sense of
shame.
He can’t bring himself to say ‘Menippean’, but he can refer to his work as a
satire in the miscellaneous sense; this agrees with the fact that he knows
that Menippean satire is compounded of prose and verse (in his Commen-
tary on Horace’s Ars poetica 220–1). In fact, when he tells the readers, as
cattle, to go home now that they have been fed (pasti) he refers clearly to
satire as the lanx satura, the mixed plate.43
Nannius draws his inspiration here from Juan Luis Vives, whose Som-
nium et vigilia . . . in somnium Scipionis (‘A Dream and an All-Night Vigil
on The Dream of Scipio’, 1520) predated him by twenty years as the first
text in the humanist Menippean movement.44 These works are intellectual
fantasies, in which an author, whisked away to the heavens in a vision, a

41
Sacré 1994: 87; the essay treats both of these Somnia, and is the source of my treatment here.
42
Sacré 1994: 93.
43
Cf. the parallel passage in the Eclogues, 10.77: ite domum saturae, venit Hesperus, ite, capellae, ‘Now
you’re stuffed full. Go home, my goats; the evening star is coming; go.’
44
Vives’ work has pride of place in the chronology of Menippean works in De Smet 1996: 247–50; see
also IJsewijn 1994.
354 joel relihan
dream or an ecstasy, sees figures of truth and comes back with that truth
for his students. Vives’ topic is more books than the whole of human life;
the narrator, no longer a Menippus, rarely comes back with a tale told
against himself. But Nannius, wrestling with the archaism of Lucretius, is
willing to make himself look a little foolish in promoting a favorite, if
difficult, author.
In general, humanist authors have difficulty referring to works as
Menippean satires outside of their title pages. Theories of Menippean
satire are not to be found, though there are definitions; it all comes down
to miscellany in that branch of Menippean literature that deals with poetry
and poets. As Latin authors, humanists speak of Roman satire, but not
of the formal relationship between the Greek Lucian and their own
productions, and it is remarkable that there is no Lucian included in
the Elegantiores satyrae. But if the paradoxographical traditions lead to
‘Praise of Folly’ and Utopia and then to the Amphitheatrum, Anatomy of
Melancholy, and Swift, then the Senecan tradition, which envelops the
somnium, the dream vision, the view of the academic conclave, does have
one particular modern descendant which may allow us in retrospect to see
the humanist traditions more clearly.
In Borges’ ‘The Library of Babel’, a librarian describes the fantastic library
in which he and an entire tribe of librarians labor: a near-infinite honeycomb
of cells, unimaginably more vast than our entire universe, holding all of the
possible combinations of twenty-five orthographic symbols (twenty-two
letters, comma, period, space) as contained in books 410 pages long, each
page with forty lines, each line with about eighty characters. Inevitably, the
volumes are gibberish, but the library in toto is said to contain everything.
That is, of course, impossible, if there are texts written in alphabets of more
than twenty-two letters, unless one imagines the possibility of coding.45
The title is, of course, biblical: the Tower of Babel represents the unity of
human language prior to the God-sent catastrophe that has resulted in the
incommunicability of human cultures. The narrator is taking the nature of
the existence of the library as some sort of a proof of the existence of God, a
way to reason back to God through the fact of incommunicability. The
narrator, like all the librarians, is involved in a search for meaning in a world
of gibberish, combing the library for scraps that resemble things already
known in the world of language and literature outside of the library. Every
librarian, not just the narrator, is bending over backwards in a desperate
attempt to find meaning that probably does not exist:
45
Bloch 2008.
 Prose Satire 355
Some five hundred years ago, the chief of one of the upper hexagons came
across a book as jumbled as all the others, but containing almost two pages
of homogeneous lines. He showed his find to a traveling decipherer, who
told him that the lines were written in Portuguese; others said it was
Yiddish. Within the century experts had determined what the language
actually was: a Samoyed Lithuanian dialect of Guaraní, with inflections
from classical Arabic.46
The only conclusion to be drawn is that the narrator is looking for
meaning where it is not to be found, because the test of whether or not
anything in the library is meaningful is by comparison to what is known
outside of the library. He lives in hope of discovering a coincidental
relationship between a library text and the texts of the outside world.
The narrator’s concluding elegant hope, that it will be discovered that the
finite library is periodic, the same limited gibberish repeating infinitely, is
just a delusion: why would the infinite repetition of a finite number of
books – books that cannot possibly contain all the wisdom in our world –
be some sort of proof of the meaningfulness of the universe and of the
human place within it? ‘The Library of Babel’, in its thematic aspects,
accords with the traditions of ancient Menippean satire: the philosopher,
the word man, goes to the end of the universe in a quixotic desire to
attain an absolute and provable knowledge that was present to him in his
own world all the time; right at his feet, the Greek phrase is. Menippus’
flight to heaven in Lucian’s Icaromenippus, and his descent to Hades in
Lucian’s Necyomantia, make physical the journey that is only imagined
but never undertaken at the end of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy.
The profundity of the intellectual quest of Borges’ narrator is only mock
profundity, and the tale self-destructs at the end: If only the gibberish went
on forever!
Borges’ story grew in stages. Originally an article, ‘The Total Library’
(1939), it mocked the Totaltheater project of Gropius; this became ‘The
Library of Babel’, published in 1942 and 1944. To start with, his tower was
one hexagonal cell in diameter, infinitely tall; but in the second edition of
1956 it grew in all directions, thus parodying Le Corbusier’s design for an
infinitely expandable museum corridor.47 In the history of modern Menip-
pean satire, this story represents the short form, as opposed to monstrous
works like Anatomy of Melancholy, Tristram Shandy and Gargantua and
Pantagruel, and it may be related to the Renaissance literature that makes

46
Translation of Andrew Hurley (Borges 1998: 114), reprinted in Bloch 2008: 6.
47
Costa 2000: 7–9.
356 joel relihan
fun of critics and scholars, word men lost in thought, in worlds of their
own making. It is functionally a prolalia.48 ‘The Tower of Babel’ serves as
an introduction, not to one literary work, but to the literary and interpret-
ive enterprise as a whole.
Menippean satire as a modern analytical tool and critical category still
struggles to make itself known. Every study feels the need to define the
genre as if to an audience that has never heard of it; the theories of Bakhtin
quickly displaced the approaches of Frye, but now we live in a world that is
becoming increasingly comfortable in leaving Bakhtin behind as well.
What emerges is this: Menippean satire not only has a history, but is
involved with the histories of other genres; it speaks in different voices
at different times; it is not uniform, not because it is fundamentally
unstable (an unsatisfactory definition of a genre), but because it arrays
itself against different literary movements and different literary genres at
different times.
The Menippean satire of the Amphitheatrum may be illuminated,
again in retrospect, by more modern literary phenomena. Vincent Miller,
referring to the work of Lev Manovich, makes the argument that in the
digital age the database supplants the narrative as the authoritative form
of expression.49 The struggle between postmodern database and modern
narrative re-enacts, though with movement in the opposite direction, the
shift from pre-modern database to modern narrative. The rediscovery of
the Cena Trimalchionis in 1650 (codex Traguriensis) coincided with the
effective end of humanist Menippean satire by affording a stronger
impulse to extended narrative.50 Humanist anthologizing, which was
the recasting of works, discarding some meanings and overtones while
supplying others, was a repurposing of satire, often a decontexualization,
discarding the overtly ‘satirical’ for the ‘encyclopedic’, and moving from
the particular to the universal, where the satirist, or the satirical compil-
ation, found in the rhetoric of extolling the trivial a new view of the
world, one which the twin forces of science and narrative were soon to
displace.

48
A prolalia or ‘opening remark’ is a short piece to warm the audience up, specifically by talking about
the nature of literature or art, usually via an exaggerated analogy, and with a comic or self-parodic
twist. Lucian has several examples (Prometheus es in verbis, or ‘You’re a Literary Prometheus!’;
Zeuxis); in Latin, we have the fragmentary collection of Apuleian pieces known as the Florida
(‘Purple Passages’).
49
Miller 2008: 390–2; Manovich 2002. I thank my colleague Josh Stenger for this reference.
50
Grafton 1990.
 Prose Satire 357

FURTHER READING
For the history of Lucian in the early Renaissance (to the 1520s) see Marsh 1998,
with chapters on the dialogue of the dead, on dialogues in heaven, the paradoxical
encomium and the fantastic voyage. For symposium literature, Jeanneret 1991
is indispensable, augmented by Burke 1993, and Marsh 1987 on Alberti’s
Intercenales. While IJsewijn 1976 is fundamental, the three most important
studies of humanist Menippean satire are Blanchard 1995, taking a broad,
theoretical approach to anti systematic intellectual satire; De Smet 1996, taking
a narrow approach to the politics of Menippean satires and, above all, to the
history of the dream vision; and Kivistö 2009 on the traditions of paradoxography
as they relate to the traditions of Roman satire as a healing genre. De Smet 1996:
247 50 offers an invaluable chronological listing of Menippean works from
1520 to 1761 (and beyond). Porter 2014c helps to disentangle Menippean satire
from prose fiction; Morrish Tunberg 2014 considers utopian literature as a
separate set of literary phenomena. For Menippean traditions immediately prior
to the Renaissance, see Dronke 1994 and Relihan (forthcoming); for traditions
immediately subsequent, Castrop 1983 and the opening chapters of Weinbrot
2005. What remains to be written is an account of the process of the successive
anthologizations of humanist texts.
 chapter 21

Historiography
Felix Mundt

Considering the vast number of neo-Latin works dealing with the history
of peoples, territories, cities, kings and families from all over Europe and
the New World, it was an inevitable decision not to attempt an overview of
these works themselves but rather to focus on the most important issues
and problems that emerged with the beginning of the Renaissance, and the
methods humanist historiographers developed in response from about
1400 to 1550. This essay aims to consolidate the reader’s instinct for some
important characteristics of neo-Latin historiography, regardless of which
region or period he or she is interested in.

Leonardo Bruni – The Homer of Neo-Latin Historiography?

Many scholars consider Leonardo Bruni’s (1370–1444) Historiae Florentini
populi (‘History of the Florentine People’) as not only the very first piece of
humanist historiography but also the most perfect one.1 Bruni seems to
combine all the virtues one expects from a Renaissance historiographer:
thorough analysis of all available sources, veracity and above all the ability to
describe the history of a late medieval city-state using an elegant language and
a system of values and terms shaped by Thucydides, Polybius, Livy and
Sallust. To combine contemporary matters with ancient patterns in such
a masterly way requires not only a skilful author but also a topic that is
suitable for this kind of approach, and Bruni’s Florence certainly was: an
Italian city-state of ancient origin, it held more than regional importance in
terms of culture and power. Despite the continual struggles between nobility
and bourgeoisie, its inhabitants considered themselves to be a popolo united
under a republican constitution. The first of Bruni’s twelve books covers the
period from the origins of the city to the first half of the thirteenth century.
Bruni of course takes pride in the history of his hometown, but he does not
1
As Cochrane 1981: 1 puts it: ‘Like Minerva, humanist historiography was born fully grown.’

358
 Historiography 359
feel the need to decorate its origins with any kind of founding myth. Instead,
he elegantly and concisely embeds the Florentine history into the course of
centuries dominated by Etruscans and Romans, always attaching slightly
more importance to Florence than it deserved and blaming Rome for
granting less relevance to Florence in ancient times.2
The account of the Roman emperors – who according to Bruni were
intolerant of liberty, became victims of their own intrigues and thus caused
the decline of the Roman Empire3 – provides the leitmotif for the rest of the
work: the meaning and importance of libertas. In books 2–11 Bruni gives an
account of the 150 years up to 1402 in a distinctively Livian manner. The
antagonism between the nobiles who were always prone to abuse their power
and the upcoming bourgeoisie who wanted to have their right to liberty
guaranteed by law, the broader and omnipresent antagonism between Guelphs
and Ghibellines and the wars against rival city-states are combined to create a
coherent account. In accordance with ancient tradition, the regularly inter-
spersed speeches are invented but mirror the substance of actual statements. By
means of speeches the author can stage a prominent character, whose words
lead to a focus on a complex historical conflict. Take, for example, the speech
of Ianus Labella (Giano della Bella) who in 1293 was the initiator of the
Ordinamenti di Giustizia, a law that kept members of the nobility from public
office. He is introduced as a true tribune of the people (4.26–7):
Nec sane plenam ad servitutem plebis quicquam aliud obstare videbatur
quam quod nobilitas ipsa, inter sese varie divisa, aemulatione et invidia
concertabat. [27] Hanc igitur deformitatem et labem rei publicae tollere
aggressus est vir unus, per eam tempestatem magnitudine animi et consilio
pollens, Ianus Labella, claris quidem maioribus ortus, sed ipse modicus civis
et apprime popularis.
Indeed, it seemed that the only obstacle to the complete servitude of the
common people was the nobility’s own internal divisions, riven as it was by
envy and competitive rivalries. One man tried to stop the corruption and
decline of the commonwealth: Giano della Bella, who showed greatness and
wisdom during that stormy time. He was descended from distinguished
ancestors, but was himself a man of moderation and strongly populist in
his sympathies.
In the final paragraphs of the speech, Bruni makes Labella combine the
central concepts of the Historiae: personal liberty and the relative

2
‘Rome drew to herself everything wonderful that was engendered in Italy and drained all other cities.’
(Hist. Flor. 1.11) Translations closely follow Hankins 2001.
3
Hist. Flor. 1.38.
360 felix mundt
independence of ancient Florence (4.33): ‘Maiores nostri ne imperatoribus
quidem romanis servire sustinuerunt, quamquam et titulum praetenden-
tibus et dignitate hominum servitutem honestante. Vos vilissimis homi-
num servire sustinebitis?’ (‘Our ancestors forebore to serve even Roman
emperors, although the title to which the emperors pretended and their
rank made the servitude less dishonourable. Shall you continue serving
the vilest men?’) The narrative then shifts from internal to foreign affairs.
[35] Constituta per hunc modum re publica domi, externam ad quietem
versae mentes, de pace cum Pisanis agere coeperunt . . . Sed ne nobilitas,
quae bello clarescere solebat, per occasionem militiae aliquid moliretur, et
plebs nusquam a rei publicae custodia abscederet, pacem potius visum est
quam bellum expedire.
Public affairs having thus been put in order at home, the people turned
their attention to tranquility abroad, and began to negotiate a peace with
the Pisans . . . Nevertheless, it seemed the better course to make peace
rather than continue the war to prevent the nobility, which generally
distinguishes itself in wartime, from using the occasion of military service
to begin some plot, and the common people from ever relaxing their
vigilance in protecting the commonwealth.
If the reader of these lines is strongly reminded of Livy, that is not by
accident.4 Everyone familiar with classical Roman historiography feels
immediately at home, but caution is recommended: the reader is easily
set on the wrong track if he is not aware that it is anything but natural or
self-evident to describe the condition of late medieval Florence in a Livian
style, following the classical Roman system of values. A contemporary
Florentine reader might well have been led to imagine republican Rome
as a replica of his hometown; a modern reader who is not familiar with the
history of medieval Italy will probably use Rome as a mental model for
medieval Florence. So Bruni and the contemporary exponents of what
Hans Baron has called ‘civic humanism’5 established a powerful and
sophisticated set of associations which made the long distance between
antiquity and present disappear before the reader’s eye.
I could now bring this chapter to a very quick end if it was true that
every humanist historian used this technique in just this way to bridge the
gap between his own time and the admired models of antiquity and at

4
Vir unus: Liv. 22.22.6; 25.37.1; 38.17.8; servitus plebis: 1.17.7; titulum praetendere: 37.54.13; vilissima
(genera) hominum: 36.17.5; bello clarus: 9.26.14; 42.49.7. On the importance of Livy for Bruni cf.
Ianziti 2012: 14–18; 63–8.
5
The concept of civic humanism and its limitations are discussed by Hay 1988: 133–49, Fubini 2003:
94–5 and Blickle 2000: 295.
 Historiography 361
the same time to ennoble the recent past of the region or kingdom about
which he wrote. But it is not that simple. Style and themes of fifteenth-
century historiography even in the Italian city-states diverge to an enor-
mous extent,6 let alone the rest of Europe. Every historian has his own
story to tell and his own masters to serve, and draws on ancient models as
he thinks best. Take as an example the Bellum civile et Gallicum (‘Civil and
Gallic War’) by Giacomo Curlo, which praises the defeat of the French by
the Genovese Doge Paolo Fregoso in 1461. The title reminds us of Caesar,
the beginning is taken from Pliny’s famous letter 6.16 to Tacitus; Fregoso
is on a par with the Livian Camillus.7 So where to start?

The Artes Historiae Scribendae

If Bruni’s method is not the universal model for the myriads of neo-
Latin histories, it could be tempting to save the trouble of reading
through countless volumes by referring instead to some of the neatly
arranged Artes historicae. Except for the famous Methodenkapitel (meth-
odological digressions) of several historians and some passages in Cicero,
Quintilian and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, classical antiquity has left
us with only a single treatise about the writing of history: Lucian’s
De historia conscribenda (‘How History Should Be Written’), written
by a man who does not himself count among the masters of ancient
historiography.8 The Renaissance in contrast brought forth a larger
number of systematic outlines of the historian’s art. One of the first
and most influential was Giovanni Pontano’s dialogue Actius, although
written some years after Pontano had composed his De bello Neapolitano
(‘On the Neapolitan War’).9
Theory followed practice, and the same holds true for the whole genre
of the Ars historica. Among the best-known treatises are François Bau-
douin’s De institutione historiae universae et eius cum iurisprudentia con-
iunctione prolegomenon libri ii (‘Two Books of Prolegomena on the
System of Universal History and its Connection with Jurisprudence’,
1561), David Chytraeus’ De lectione historiarum recte instituenda (‘On
How to Establish the Proper Way to Read Historiography’, 1563) and Jean

6 7
See Germano 1998: 150 with further reading. Germano 1998: 147, 152.
8
Nevertheless, Guarino’s short treatise De historiae conscribendae forma is highly indebted to him; cf.
Regoliosi 1991, with an edition of the text.
9
As Monti Sabia 1995 has shown, Pontano just reworked a few passages of his monograph after writing
the Actius. Another important theoretical text is Lorenzo Valla’s preface to his Historiae Ferdinandi
regis Aragoniae (written in 1445), thoroughly analyzed by Ferraù 2001: 1–42.
362 felix mundt
Bodin’s Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (‘Method to Easily
Understand Historiography’, 1566).10 In these texts that were written at a
time when the practice of humanist historiography was already fully
developed,11 much is said about the skills necessary for the historian in
terms of methodology and style, the difference between philosophers and
historians, the usefulness of history as magistra vitae, history as an image of
divine providence, the value of truth and the importance of a training in
law and geography. The treatises are shaped by concepts drawn from
rhetoric and philosophy of history. They set out a complete and coherent
system which hardly any historian ever followed. Interesting as they may
be for the study of humanist political thought and philosophy of history,
they fall short of explaining the way how historiography had developed
since Bruni’s times.12 But in one thing Jean Bodin was perfectly right:
Nulla quaestio magis exercuit historiarum scriptores, quam quae habetur
de origine populorum13 (‘No problem ever bothered historians more than
the open question of the origin of peoples’), which leads us to the next
paragraph.

(Pseudo-)Modern Answers to Medieval Questions:

Annius, Antiquitates
Origin tales inserted in historiographical texts serve various purposes. They
satisfy the curiosity to learn something about the remote past, build a
foundation for the society of the present and provide a connection between
local history and the larger context of world history as it was transmitted by
the Bible, Eusebius/Jerome and pagan myths.14 Problems appeared as soon
as it was felt necessary to establish an uninterrupted genealogical connec-
tion between peoples or persons playing major roles in the biblical or
classical tradition and the nation or at least the ruling dynasty relevant to
the chronicle. The Historia Brittonum, dating probably from the ninth

10
Treatises from Italy are assembled and commented upon by Kessler 1971; the development of the
genre is examined by Cotroneo 1971.
11
This being the case, Bodin was able to suggest in his last chapter a canon of historians from antiquity
to his own time, structured by countries.
12
This simple general rule, first stated in 1911 by Fueter 1936: v, has been challenged by Croce 1915:
130–2, but still holds some validity if it is taken with caution, cf. Cotroneo 1971: 3–8 and Landfester
1972: 8. It should however not prevent us from examining historiography and its theory as products
of the same intellectual background.
13
Bodin 1566: 403.
14
Especially in the late Middle Ages the genres of universal and regional history are almost
indistinguishable, cf. Johanek 1987 and Mertens 2001.
 Historiography 363
century, does not hesitate to draw on both the Bible and the Aeneid to
explain the origins of the British people without preferring one version.
In a first account the mythical ancestor Brutus or Britto is introduced as a
grandson of Aeneas. A few pages later he is embedded into a so-called
‘Table of Nations’ and presented, alongside other eponymous heroes, as an
offspring of Noah’s son Japhet. In the fifteenth century the problems
concerning the connection between biblical and pagan tradition and the
origins of European nations had not yet been solved. But at the end of
the century, the Dominican friar Giovanni Nanni (Annius) of Viterbo
(c. 1432–1502) made a daring attempt to offer a solution. In his monumen-
tal Antiquitates he presented a range of works written by Fabius Pictor,
Cato the Elder, a certain Xenophon and others along with a detailed
commentary. As he told his readers, he had found the texts among the
assets of a deceased fellow friar. Actually he had forged them himself.
The major part of the seventeen books deals with the history of Latium
and Italy but since the money for the publication was procured by the
Spanish ambassador at the court of the Borgia pope Alexander VI, Annius
dedicated the volume to the Spanish crown and broadened the scope of
his work to include the origins of Spain and other European nations.
Although most of the sources the Antiquitates contained soon came under
suspicion, the forgeries had a deep impact on sixteenth-century historiog-
raphy and divided the community of scholars into believers and critics.
The Annian system of forged evidence is based upon euhemerism and
onomastics.15 Among other traditional and recently discovered texts such as
Lactantius’ Divinae institutiones (‘Divine Principles’), Ovid’s Fasti and the
Origo gentis Romanae (‘On the Origin of the Roman People’), Annius drew
upon Diodorus Siculus who had been published in 1472 in Latin translation
by Poggio Bracciolini.16 If the pagan gods were in fact nothing but great men
and kings, every mythical account could be used for the history of mankind,
a popular method in late antiquity employed by both Christian and pagan
authors.17 As we are told in the first book of Ovid’s Fasti, Janus ruled Latium
when Saturnus arrived there in his flight from Jupiter. Annius’ source of
information for that account is Quintus Fabius Pictor.18 The second
important concept is that of homonyms: some things or people bearing
one name are in fact multiple. That idea is developed in the short treatise De

15
Annius’ methods are revealed by Goez 1974 and Ligota 1987, on his biography see Weiss 1962.
16
Diodorus had introduced euhemerism into historiography and held that Kronos was a former king
of Sicily and Italy (Diod. Sic. 3.61.3).
17
Origo Rom. 1; Lact. inst. 1.15.1–4. 18
Ps.-Fabius Pictor, Annius 1515: fol. 41v.
364 felix mundt
aequivocis (‘On Homonyms’) by a certain Xenophon, son of Gripho, who,
as we learn from Annius’ commentary, lived during the ninety-fifth Olym-
piad, i.e. in the first half of the fourth century bce.19 The confusion with the
famous historian, son of Gryllos, is certainly intended. Sharing the same
name works with places20 as well as with mortals and gods:21
The eldest ancestors of the dynasties of noble kings, who founded cities, are
all called Saturn. Their firstborns are called Jupiter and Juno, the strongest
among their grandsons Hercules. The fathers of the Saturns are called
Heavens, their wives are in each case Rhea, the wives of the Heavens Vesta.
Hence there are as many Heavens, Vestas, Rheas, Junos, Jupiters and
Herculeses as Saturns. Besides, a person who is called Hercules by one
nation might well be a Jupiter for another. For Ninus, who had been called
Hercules by the Chaldeans, was regarded as a Jupiter by the Assyrians.

Annius’ most important forgeries, Pseudo-Berosus and Pseudo-Manetho,

filled the spatial and chronological gap between biblical history and that of
western Europe. ‘Berosus’ provides us with a genealogical tradition for almost
every European nation. Annius has chosen his mouthpiece with great care.
The Babylonian historian Berossos had lived around 300 bce and was known
by name from Flavius Josephus and Eusebius. He had written a historical
work dedicated to Antiochus I and thus belonged simultaneously to Baby-
lonian and Hellenistic culture. To lay the ground for his forged Berosus,
Annius in Book 7 of the Antiquitates had made his ‘Cato the Elder’ discard
the whole tradition of Greek and Roman historiography. The commentaries
upon the forged sources, which are themselves often written in a rather
clumsy Latin style to suggest antiquity, show an enormous amount of
humanist learning. In these commentaries, Annius cites the authors who
had been the inspiration for all his forgeries, as for example Pliny the Elder
and Tacitus. At the end, Berosus provides the clue to the whole puzzle:22
Cumque [sc. Noah] ivisset ad regendum Kitim, quam nunc Italiam nomi
nant, desyderium sui reliquit Armenis, ac propterea post mortem illum
arbitrati sunt in animam caelestium corporum tralatum, et illi divinos
honores impenderunt . . . Ob beneficium inventae vitis et vini dignatus
est cognomento Iano quod Arameis sonat vitifer et vinifer.
When Noah had gone away to rule Kitim, which is now called Italy, he left
the Armenians with a desire for him, and then, after his death, they believed

19
Annius 1515: fol. 34rv.
20
Ps.-Xenophon De aequivocis, Annius 1515: fol. 36r: ‘“Olympus” denotes more than one thing. For
every mountain of a certain altitude in any region is called “Olympus” by the Greeks.’
21
Ibid., fol. 34v. 22
Ps.-Berosus, Annius 1515: fol. 115rv.
 Historiography 365
that he had joined the soul of heavenly bodies and honored him as a god . . .
And because he had invented the convenience of viticulture,23 they found
him worthy to bear the epithet ‘Janus’, which in the Aramaic language
means ‘Bringer of vines’ and ‘Bringer of wine’.
Thus Noah and Janus are the same person, and Annius’ beloved Latium
has the privilege of having been ruled by the founder of mankind himself.
The rest of Europe has been populated by his sons and grandsons, e.g. the
Germans by Hercules Alemannus who, as a Hercules, was a son of Jupiter
(i.e. Tacitus’ Tuisco) and grandson of Janus alias Heaven alias Noah.24
Based on his deep learning, which also included some knowledge of
Hebrew, and acquaintance with a vast number of ancient texts cited in the
extensive commentaries – the forged sources themselves are quite short –
Annius attempted to solve a question which had already begun to become
obsolete: whether we are descended from a man called Noah or some promin-
ent character of the pagan tradition, or both. In the first half of the sixteenth
century (and even for some decades after), the community of European
historians was split into two factions. For some of them this question was still
so important that they were inclined to trust the Antiquitates. The others
frankly called Annius a liar and turned their attention to different modes of
bridging the gap between present and past which had already been developed.

The Spatial Turn: Flavio Biondo I

The description of a given geographical space combined with information
on the historical background had a well-established tradition in antiquity
(cf. the works of Strabo, Pomponius Mela, Pliny the Elder, Solinus) and
was known to medieval authors. So the combination of geography and
history is not a humanist invention but it became a very important feature
of Renaissance historiography by the efforts of Flavio Biondo of Forlì
(1392–1463). After having distinguished himself as a linguist by his work
De verbis Romanae locutionis (‘On the Words of Roman Speech’, 1435) and
as an annalist by the Historiarum ab inclinatione Romani imperii decades iii
(‘Three Decades of History from the Decline of the Roman Empire’, 1441),
and after having established Roman archaeology by his De Roma instaurata
libri tres (‘Rome Restored in Three Books’, 1444–6), in the 1450s he wrote
the Italia illustrata and introduced geography into the writing of history.25

23
Cf. Gen. 9.20f. 24
Commentary on Berosus, Annius 1515: fol. 125v.
25
The description of countries is of course not limited to historiography. In his vast contribution
Defilippis 2012 locates the chorographic genre within the whole range of neo-Latin prose writing.
366 felix mundt
In the prologue of the third decade of the Historiae, he had outlined very
distinctively the challenges a historian writing in Latin had to face. These
problems are condensed in the term mutatio. For a historian writing in
classical Latin, the changes that have taken place since antiquity in terms of
language, manners and customs, political institutions and, after the Migra-
tion Period, the population of every European region are much more
difficult to handle than for a poet. How should he reconcile the require-
ments for a writer and a historian, namely elegance and veracity?
Ut enim pauca de multis dicam, eum, qui omnibus in bello praeest, sive
proprium, sive alienum mercennarius administrat exercitum appellaturus,
si more vetusto imperatorem dixero, in aequivocum incido illius, quem
Caesaris loco habemus.
To speak briefly about a complex topic: if I follow the ancient tradition by
calling the man who in the war is the leader of all imperator (no matter if he
commands his own or, as a mercenary, a foreign army), I get into a conflict
of homonymy with the man who for us is the Emperor.26
It is this awareness that the resuscitation of the ancient style of writing is
as desirable as it is impossible that is distinctive of the best humanist
historians.27 In the Italia illustrata, he tried out a new approach. The aim
of the whole project is outlined in an early version of the preface, which
had been written by Francesco Barbaro on behalf of Biondo:28
Unde peragrare ac lustrare Italiam coepi, ut . . . non solum cum praesentis
aevi hominibus in Italia nunc essem, quod a principio quaesiveram, sed ut
in Italia, ut ita dicam, me censore illustrata tecum in futurum et cum
posteris viverem et intermortuam culpa temporum memoriam cum doc
tissimis hominibus huius aetatis in lucem revocarem.
I therefore started to travel through Italy because I not only wanted to live
in Italy now together with the people of this age (that was my desire from
the beginning), but my aim is to live together with you and with posterity
in an Italy that has been illustrated thanks to my records, and, together with
the most learned men of my age, to bring to light again the remembrance
abolished by the fault of time.
The term illustrare/illustrata, which was to have a distinguished future as a
book title,29 denotes very well what the humanist historian is doing.30
Instead of relying exclusively on written sources, he travels around (lus-
trare) searching after all kinds of remains of the past: texts, ruins and place

26 27
Biondo 1531: 393. Place names cause similar difficulties: Biondo 1531: 394. Cf. Hay 1988: 51.
28 29
Pontari 2011: 41; cf. Clavuot 1990: 23; Cappelletto 1992: 181–4. Pontari 2011: 217–9.
30
Pontari 2011: 32.
 Historiography 367
names. By doing so, he (1) sheds light upon the past and thus (2) praises
the present of a country (illustrare), granting (3) immortality to himself.
Biondo’s method of giving an account of Italian history arranged not
chronologically but by regions was adopted by humanist historians all over
Europe because of its many advantages:31

• Space is continuous and provides a consistent framework. The history

even of the most famous dynasties is murkier in the more distant past,
and in the history of events, there are always periods not reflected in
the sources at all. Any historiographic work organized chronologically
cannot avoid this difficulty.
• A spatial framework dispenses the historian from constructing chrono-
logical (and by that: causal) continuity where there is none.
• The geographic point provides a bridge between present and past. Its name,
its inhabitants, the political constitution may have changed, but its position
is immutable. It serves as an Archimedean point for any humanist who
aims to stress the interrelation between present and antiquity.
• Any rhetorically and philologically trained humanist who followed Bion-
do’s method most probably felt at home immediately because historiog-
raphy in the ‘x-illustrata-style’ resembles a commentary – not on a text but
on a clearly defined region.32 Just as a philological commentator is always
free to explain a single term or person, or offer comment on the context
(and, at the same time, to omit things he could not find out about or
which he considers irrelevant), the humanist historian may explain some
place name, describe some ruins, deliver a panegyric on a famous city or
cite some ancient sources dealing with the place he is interested in – if
there are any. If not, there are many other options to fill the pages.
• The method works for regions of any size; it is appropriate for king-
doms as well as for counties and cities.

The Linguistic Turn – Flavio Biondo II

As we have seen, humanist historiographers adopted the spatial point of view
as a technique that allowed the author to connect present and past without
offending the rule of veracity. There is a second preference – humanist

31
At the beginning of the sixteenth century the geographical approach was especially favored in
Germany. Cf. Strauss 1959: 22–5; Muhlack 2002. On successors in Italy see Hay 1988: 380–7.
32
Compare, e.g., Vadianus’ commentary on Pomponius Mela with Beatus Rhenanus’ Res Germanicae.
Cf. Schirrmeister 2009: 23.
368 felix mundt
historians are fond of etymological research for three reasons: their philo-
logical training in general; the idea that finding the oldest and very first
meaning of a word means finding the truth, invented already by Heraclitus
and Plato and communicated to the Middle Ages by Isidore of Seville; and
the ancient rhetorical convention that any description of places should begin
with the explanation of their names. The etymological method has an air of
scientificity, and so the humanists used it as well as their medieval predeces-
sors. There are many examples of tempting but wrong etymologies which
helped to support alleged relations between peoples and places that today
seem hazardous. From the time of Gottfried of Viterbo, it was common to
identify the Hungarians with the Huns;33 Albert Krantz thought that the
land of the Slavic Wends at the Baltic sea coast was the home of the
Vandals;34 Heinrich von Gundelfingen stated a kinship between the Swedes
and the Swiss.35 An old-fashioned historian wishing to flatter a king or an
emperor would have constructed a genealogy tracing the royal family back to
Aeneas or Priam. But these methods became a feature of panegyric rather
than historiography. An early modern historian like Beatus Rhenanus pre-
sents the dedicatee – the Roman king Ferdinand, brother of Charles V – of
his Res Germanicae, published in 1531, with the ‘proof’ that the name of the
ancestral seat of his family (Habsburg) stems from the Roman military camp
of Avendum.36 Apart from the uninterrupted medieval tradition, Biondo’s
Italia illustrata, which starts with considerations about the etymology of the
word Italia, is again highly influential on later writers.

The Transmitter: Enea Silvio Piccolomini

As in other genres, the historiographical works of the Italians had a deep
impact on the rest of Europe.37 It is well known that, due to his diplomatic
activities in Vienna and Basel, Enea Silvio Piccolomini (1405–64) was an
important figure in the transmission of humanist knowledge and style to
northern Europe. This is above all true for historiography. Asia and Europa
are widescale histories structured by geography. The Historia Austrialis is
the prototype of humanist regional history.38 Its main characteristics are:

33 34 35
Havas and Kiss 2002: 288–9. Andermann 1999: 172. Maissen 2002: 217.
36
Mundt 2008: 32. He does this by applying the rules of aspiration and betacism. Unfortunately this
etymology (Habsburg in fact is derived from Habichtsburg – ‘the hawk’s castle’) is as wrong as a
Trojan pedigree would have been.
37
Cf. Helmrath, Muhlack and Walther 2002.
38
Strictly speaking, this is true of the important second of three revisions of the text; cf. Knödler and
Wagendorfer 2009: xxiii.
 Historiography 369

• The combination of geographical and chronological structure.

• An initial geographical description and etymological analysis of Vienna
and Austria.
• The plain style abandoned rarely, e.g. in speeches.
• Even if a certain ruler (in this case Frederick III) is a central figure, it is
a country that gives shape to the work as a whole. This change of
perspective is an important starting point for concepts of nation and
nationalism, especially in the German-speaking areas.39
• Where possible, allusions are made to incidents recounted by ancient
historians, e.g. the characterization of the aristocratic opponents of
Frederick is modeled on Sallust’s account of the Catilinarians.40

The Ideal Historian – and the Pitfalls of Practice:

Johannes Aventinus
At the turn of the sixteenth century Italian scholars all over Europe were
commissioned by kings and princes to write official national histories in
elegant Latin, e.g. Polydore Vergil by Henry VII in Britain, Paolo Emili
by Louis XII in France and Antonio Bonfini by Matthias Corvinus in
Hungary. Lucius Marineus Siculus worked in Spain.41 But native scholars
were also involved in the process of rewriting the history of their own
nations. Johannes Aventinus (1477–1534) wrote the Annales ducum Boiariae
by order of the Dukes of Bavaria. Some years later, he delivered a German
version, the Bairische Chronik.42 In a letter to his colleague Beatus Rhenanus,
he outlines the challenges for a contemporary historian:43
Stilus quidem ac iudicium ut necessaria sunt, ita non propria huic operi;
sunt enim omnium professorum communia, ut ita loquar, ferramenta . . .
Proprium historiae est maximarum rerum cognitio, nimirum agnoscere
atque scire regionum gentiumque mores, situm, qualitatem telluris, reli
giones, instituta, leges, novos veteresque colonos, imperia, regna. Haec
autem absque cosmographiae mathematicaeque diligenti studio ac peregri
natione usque ad fastidium, etiam sine ope principum ac sumptibus
nec disci nec inquiri possunt . . . Diligentissimam lectionem veterum scrip
torum, quales Tacitus, Strabo, Ptolemaeus, taceo. Hi diligentissime

39 40
Hirschi 2012. Wagendorfer 2003: 143–80.
41
On Polydore and Marineus cf. Rexroth 2002 and Schlelein 2010.
42
On the interdependence of Latin and the vernacular in historiography cf. Goerlitz 1999, Burke
2007b, Schlelein 2009 and Völkel 2009. On Aventinus in general see Doronin 2013.
43
Horawitz and Hartfelder 1886: 344–6. Letters are an important source for theoretical reflections of
Renaissance historiographers, cf. Landfester 1972: 32–3.
370 felix mundt
omnium Germaniam descripsere, sed quotusquisque eosdem intelligit? Ob
commutationes rerum nulla gens in Germania est, adde etiam, si libet, in
universa Europa, Asia, Aphrica, quae aut vetera cognomina aut avitas sedes
retineat: Ita omnia commutata sunt. Istaec scire et diligenter animadvertere
proprium historiae est. Praeterea diplomata vetera imperatorum, regum,
principum, pontificum, leges, edicta, epistolae ultro citroque missae,
rescripta verissima certissimaque historiae sunt fundamenta. Illa indagare
ac evolvere opus est maius privatis opibus. Nam monachi huiuscemodi
monumenta, sicut sacra, sexcentis clavibus in cistis conclusa servant, nec te
nisi iussu eius, cui parere necesse est, eadem vel a limite salutare sinunt . . .
Haud alio pacto inlustrari Germania poterit, quam ut quique publicis
auspiciis terrae suae omnes angulos perreptent, dirutarum urbium vestigia
ab accolis inquirant, bibliothecas excutiant, diplomata evolvant suamque
observationem cum veterum traditione conferant, hique tandem consi
dentes communi consilio, quae unusquisque observarit, communicent
atque in publicum prodant. . . . Aiunt Sallustium scripturum bellum
Iugurthinum Aphricam perlustrasse . . .
Style and judgment may be necessary, but they are not peculiar to this
occupation. In fact they are, so to say, tools common to all kinds of
scholars. Peculiar to history is the investigation of the most important
concerns, that is to recognize and to know the habits, the geographical
location, the soil quality, the religions, customs, laws, the current and
former inhabitants, dominions and kingdoms of regions or peoples. These
things are neither to be learned nor to be investigated without a diligent
interest in cosmography and mathematics and without traveling ad nau
seam and, I may add, without support and funding from the rulers . . . to
say nothing of the most scrupulous studying of ancient authors like Tacitus,
Strabo and Ptolemy. These three have described Germany more accurately
than anyone else yet how many understand them? Things have changed,
and this is why there is no tribe in Germany (and, you may add: all over
Europe, Asia and Africa) which has preserved its ancient name or still
inhabits its ancestral place of settlement. So profoundly everything has
changed. To know this and to be exactly aware of it this is peculiar to
history. Besides, old charters of emperors, kings, princes and popes, their
laws, edicts, letters sent to and fro and rescripts are the most veracious and
reliable fundaments of history. To seek out and to read through all these
records is a task that exceeds the capabilities of one private citizen. For the
monks keep such documents safe in their chests secured by innumerable
pedlocks, as if they were sacred objects. And they will not even allow you
just to say hello to them from a distance, unless they are ordered to do so
by a person they have to obey. There is only one way to illuminate the
history of Germany: Many people by public order must creep into each and
every corner of their particular region, must inquire of the inhabitants
where to find ruins of abandoned towns, they must scrutinize libraries,
read through documents and compare their observations to the old and
established tradition. And finally, they shall gather by common
 Historiography 371
appointment, communicate what they have found and publish it . . . It is said
that Sallust has traveled Africa before he was going to write his ‘Iugurthine war’.

There is much to be learned from this letter of the self-conception of the

early modern historian, which necessarily shapes his literary style. I would
like to point out the central thoughts:

• The philological and rhetorical virtues of stilus and iudicium are neces-
sary but not sufficient for a good historian. Note that Sallust is
mentioned not as a model of style but as a predecessor in perlustratio.
It is a common mistake to claim indiscriminately that for ‘real’ human-
ist historians history is above all a rhetorical exercise. Likewise, the
sharp distinction between rhetorical historians and unambitious anti-
quarians once established by Fueter should be discarded.
• The historian has to leave his office and do fieldwork (peregrinatio).
Whoever wants to illuminate, to investigate and to embellish (illus-
trare) the history of his country first has to travel (perreptare or lustrare)
even to the most remote parts of his region.
• He should know ancient authors who are relevant for his topic rather
than those who belong to the humanist canon: Tacitus is mentioned
not as the author of Historiae and Annales or as a stylistic model but on
account of his Germania.
• The history of regiones and gentes includes such disciplines as geology
(qualitas telluris), cultural history (religiones, instituta, leges), geography
and astronomy (which are included in cosmographia and mathematica).
• The historian needs patronage and funding.
• He must be aware of the most disturbing changes (commutationes) of
peoples and geographic names that have taken place since the Migra-
tion Period.
• First of all he should collect the most reliable sources, which are not
earlier chronicles and histories but diplomata, leges, edicta, epistolae.
• Those sources have to be vindicated from the medieval world repre-
sented by the yet unexplored monastic libraries.
• The time has not yet come when one person alone could write a
reliable history of Germany. Historical research is a task for a commu-
nity of scholars willing to collaborate.
The realization of these well-defined, strikingly modern requirements
and their transformation into words was not easy to provide. Aventinus’
Annales are exemplary of the striving after the proper way of writing
history. They display the many, sometimes contradictory, influences an
early modern historian had to deal with. There are three different exordia:
372 felix mundt
Chapter 1 (p. 34): Bavarus nomen barbarum, obscaenum inauspicatumque,
semidocto vulgo protritum, recens est, nuper ab imperitis usurpari caeptum.
Chapter 2 (p. 36): Boiaria est omnis divisa in tres partes quarum unam
incolunt Narisci [. . .] aliam [. . .] Vindelici, terciam Norici.
Chapter 3 (p. 41): Iam primum omnium satis constat inter omnesque
convenit [. . .] illud, quicquid est, summum, quod deum vocamus, omnia
posse, esse unum, optimum, maximum, immensum, aeternum, infinitum [. . .]
Chapter 1: ‘Bavarian’ is a barbarian word, obscure, infelicitous, current
among the semi educated common people, quite new and only recently
seized by the ignorant.
Chapter 2: All Bavaria is divided into three parts, one of which the
Narisci inhabit, the Vindelici another, the Norici the third.
Chapter 3: First of all it is certain enough and generally accepted that this
highest being, whatever it may be, which we call God, is almighty, one, the
best and greatest, immeasurable, eternal, infinite.

The first is modeled on the humanist regional and national history,

which, as we have seen, often starts with the origins of names; the second
recalls the documentary and ethnographical writings of Caesar and
Tacitus; the third ties the work to the tradition of the medieval universal
chronicle with its reverent, if philosophically disguised, mention of the
Creator.

The Everyday Business of the Humanist

Historian – Polydore Vergil
The monumental Anglica Historia by Polydore Vergil (1470–1555) aims to
cover the whole history of England from antiquity to the present and has
already been investigated exhaustively enough to serve as an example for
humanist national history. The beginning of this work evokes neither the
annalistic nor the biographical tradition:
Britannia omnis, quae hodie Anglia et Scotia duplici nomine appellatur,
insula in Oceano contra Gallicum litus posita, dividitur in partes quatuor:
quarum unam incolunt Angli, aliam Scoti, tertiam Vualli, quartam
Cornubienses. Hi omnes vel lingua, vel moribus seu institutis inter se
differunt.
Britain as a whole, which today is called Anglia and Scotia with a twofold
appellation, being an island in the ocean opposite to the French coast, is
divided into four parts. One of these is inhabited by the English, the
second by the Scots, the third by the Welsh, the fourth by the Cornish;
who all differ from each other in terms of language, character or
constitution.
 Historiography 373
The classically trained reader will immediately recognize the influence of
Caesar and Tacitus,44 but the Middle Ages should also be taken into
account. There is no classical model for a British history, but there is an
early medieval text to compete with: Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis
Anglorum (‘Ecclesiastical history of the English people’).45 Polydore’s text
not only recalls classical authors, but also continues a medieval tradition.
Every piece of humanist historiography is a blend of several genres that
incorporates parts of classical and medieval historiography, chorography,
panegyric, philological source criticism and more. The chronologically
structured Anglica Historia is strongly influenced by Latin biography.
Books 1–8 cover the period up to 1066; from then onwards each king is
allotted one book. After a continuous historical narrative with a certain
emphasis on warfare, each book ends as a biography in the tradition of
Suetonius with the omina mortis (if any) and a list of the ruler’s good and
bad traits of character. Attached is a short survey on great men of his age.46
Where Roman sources about the earliest British history are extant, they
are cited closely.47 By analogy with Livy, who doubts the historicalness of
the Roman kings and their deeds but reports them nevertheless, Polydore
fills some pages with mythical kings descending from the eponymous hero
Brutus. Most notably, he adopts the legend of the brothers Belinus and
Brennus first told by Geoffrey of Monmouth. Brennus is said to have
emigrated to Gaul and to have come to fame as the well-known conqueror
of Rome, which induces Polydore to cite the famous passages from Livy
concerning the sack of Rome.48 A story, which a medieval writer had
modeled after the legend of Romulus and Remus, is again connected with
Livian criticism and Livian narrative and by this means handed down to
the Renaissance. Such kinds of melanges, mixed out of still influential
medieval sources, ancient authors and autonomous reflexions about the
plausibility of various traditions are characteristic for neo-Latin historiog-
raphy. On the other hand, the humanists took pleasure in deconstructing
or concealing important medieval traditions. In a way similar to that in
which Beatus Rhenanus discounted the coronation of Otto I, an event
which – transformed to the concept of translatio imperii – had become so
crucial for the medieval and early modern self-conception of the German
empire, Polydore mentions King Arthur with only a few lines. He does not

44
As did Wittchow 2009: 63.
45
For this passage, compare in particular the opening of Bede’s first book. 46
Hay 1952: 97–9.
47
For a comparison of Polydore Vergil and Caes. Gall. 4.20–1 see Schlelein 2010: 201.
48
Wittchow 2009: 67–9.
374 felix mundt
dispute that Arthur existed, but points out that nothing certain is known
about him, and that the pertinent tales suspiciously resemble the Italian
adaptations of the Song of Roland.49 Most intriguingly, the antiquarian
John Leland, first in the series of British scholars who tried to save the
Arthurian tradition, subsequently fought for Arthur’s historicity with
the very weapons of humanist historical scholarship: etymologies, source
criticism and autopsy of monuments and inscriptions.50 So the newly
developed methods could also be used in a conservative manner. As for
the speeches of rulers and military commanders, Polydore often deviates
from his sources in favor of an imitation of Livian models.51 In his text,
William the Conquerer uses Hannibal’s words to address his soldiers
before the Battle of Hastings.52 Such analogies53 are of course part of every
humanist’s stock, but rarely integrated into a sophisticated system of
references as complex as Bruni’s.
As far as we can judge, Polydore was an honest historian also in the parts of
his work dealing with contemporary history. Nevertheless, there is a tendency
to cast a favorable light on the first Tudor kings, perceptible by omissions. So
he managed both to observe the virtue of veracity54 and to write nothing that
could contradict his own conservative attitude towards religious policy.55
The influence of neo-Latin historiography on literature, culture and
understanding of history is mostly difficult to estimate and does not
compare to the impact of Sallust, Livy or Tacitus on Latin literature. Most
humanist histories are specimens of a scholarly large-scale production.
Some of them are outstanding in terms of methodology, extent, innova-
tiveness or rhetorical elaboration, and have been reprinted for more than
two hundred years. For Polydore Vergil (as for his Scottish colleague
Hector Boethius) it holds true that, via the English translations, his work
influenced Shakespeare’s royal dramas.56 Beatus Rhenanus has been used
by Leibniz,57 and the large historical and topographical monographs by
men such as Sebastian Münster or William Camden emerged from the
tradition traced in this short overview.

49 50
Polydore Vergil 1534: 58. Carley 1996; Utz 2006.
51
An ancient or early modern reader probably knew better than we do that it was nearly impossible to
deliver a Livian speech before the soldiers in a military camp and therefore exonerated the historian
from the duty of strict accuracy. Cf. Curry 2008: 78–9.
52
Liv. 21.44.1, cf. Schlelein 2011: 253. Cf. Curry 2008 on the Battle of Agincourt (1415).
53
Cf. the obvious parallels between Jeanne d’Arc and the Livian Cloelia: Royan 2002: 467.
54 55
Hay 1952: 154. Hay 1952: 114–16.
56
Hay 1952: 144–5; Rosenstein 2003. On his impact on Elizabethan historiography see Binns 1990:
178–86.
57
Mundt 2008: 480.
 Historiography 375

Instead of a Conclusion: A Little Toolkit

For the reader who hopes to explore one of the countless pieces of humanist
historiography that have not been mentioned here, the following questions
may help to reach beyond the mere accumulation of classical similia:
• Neo-Latin historians often exceed the boundaries of the genre(s)
defined by Sallust, Livy and Tacitus and also borrow from other genres,
e.g. biography, commentarii, geography or panegyric. Which of them
are relevant in your special case?
• How is the material arranged? Chronologically, geographically, genea-
logically or is there a mixed structure?
• Are the aims and methods of the work revealed in the paratexts (e.g.
preface, letters of dedication)? The design of the indices may also hint
at the intention of author and publisher.
• Which sources were available to your author? Which sources have been
discovered most recently, and been discussed by members of his circle
of acquaintances? It is obligatory to examine the historian’s correspond-
ence, if extant.
• Did he evidently prefer one ancient model (in terms of style or political
attitude) or is he an eclecticist?
• Are there traces of medieval traditions in the contents as well as in the
overall structure?
• How does the author use anachronistic terms? Is he conscious of that
problem? To give an example: If he calls the mayor of a city consul or
the French Galli, is that a kind of assertion or are those terms used
unwittingly?
• The same test should be applied to terms denoting traditional Roman
values (e.g. virtus, auctoritas, libertas), be they attached to peoples or
persons. It may be obvious that being described as pius means something
different for an early modern king than for Aeneas. But your author has
probably also another conception of iustitia, modestia and dignitas than
Sallust had.
• Is the author obliged to any special ruler or dynasty?
• Is he interested in Church history and confessional disputes?
• What are his methods of bridging the gap between antiquity and the
present time? Genealogies, language and etymology, the continuity of
places and territories, the kinship of nations?
• How are traditional elements (e.g. ancient myth, the Old Testament,
the Four Empires, translatio imperii) treated? Are they integrated,
approved, criticized or ignored?
376 felix mundt

• Is there any kind of a proto-nationalist conception of history? Does the

investigation of language and ancient ancestors (or alleged ancestors)
serve as a basis for the construction of national identity or for the
purpose of contemporary political discourse?
There is still much work to be done.

F U R T H E R RE A D IN G
Rabasa et al. 2012 is the standard handbook. The overview in Völkel 2006:
195 249 is an excellent introduction and offers a manageable canon of authors.
Readers without German should begin with Laureys 2014 and Baker 2015.
Cochrane 1981 and Fubini 2003 are most significant for the beginnings of
humanist historiography in Italy. Landfester 1972 and Grafton 2007 may serve
as introductions to the artes historiae. The forgeries of Annius are explained by
Stephens 1979 and Ligota 1987, their impact on European historiography and
poetry is discussed by Stephens 2004 and Bizzocchi 1995. The best account of
Flavio Biondo’s merits is given by Fubini 2003 and Pontari 2011. The papers
collected in Helmrath et al. 2002 deal with the dissemination of methods and
styles of history writing from Italy to the rest of Europe. For anyone interested in
Polydore Vergil, Hay 1952 is still indispensable. The route that leads from the
humanist historians to the beginnings of historism is described by Muhlack 1991.
Various aspects of early modern history writing are covered by the collected
volumes edited by Di Stefano et al. 1992, Helmrath et al. 2009 and Rau and
Studt 2010.
 chapter 22

Using Manuscripts and Early Printed Books

Craig Kallendorf

Introduction
In many respects neo-Latin literature can be viewed as the natural chrono-
logical extension of the Latin literature of antiquity, whose language and
literary conventions it largely shares. All books, however, have a material as
well as a textual component, and here it is dangerous to posit a seamless
continuity from Virgil to Petrarca (Petrarch) to Erasmus. Only a few
papyrus fragments and a handful of manuscripts from late antiquity that
contain works of classical literature survive, so modern scholars have to
reconstruct the original texts. Since generally accepted procedures have
been developed to account for the missing textual states, however, and
since the corpus of classical Latin literature is relatively small, there is
widespread agreement that all the surviving works should be made avail-
able in modern critical editions. This has largely been done, and the reader
often has a choice between an Oxford Classical Text, a volume from the
Loeb Classical Library, a Budé text and a Teubner edition of the same
work of classical Latin literature.
From the material perspective, the situation is quite different for neo-
Latin. Many neo-Latin works of literature survive in contemporary manu-
scripts, some in autograph versions, some in presentation copies and some
in multiple states of revision. It is therefore not necessarily a good idea
simply to transfer the same editorial procedures from classical to post-
classical texts without thinking carefully about method and practice. And
there is by no means a consensus that neo-Latinists should be working
toward a modern critical edition of every text in an enormous corpus that
has so far resisted complete bibliographical control.1

1
For further discussion of the particular challenges of editing neo-Latin material, see Chapter 23.
For reasons that will become clear in the discussion that follows, a good many references in this
chapter will be to digital resources. In order to avoid overburdening the notes, these references will be
placed in the text. All URLs were accurate as of September 2015.

379
380 craig kallendorf
In this essay I shall try to provide some answers, by necessity partial and
at times provisional, to three questions that arise from this state of affairs:
first, what are the advantages of approaching neo-Latin texts through the
manuscripts and early printed books in which they are generally found,
rather than through modern critical editions? Second, what resources exist
to allow the neo-Latinist access to the world of manuscripts and early
printed books? And finally, what kinds of evidence are lost if the material
aspects of neo-Latin literature are not taken into account?

Manuscript, Early Printed Book or Modern Edition?

For some neo-Latin authors the rationale for a modern printed edition
initially seems clear and compelling. One thinks immediately, for example,
of Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch), who is considered the founding father of
neo-Latin literature but also a major figure in intellectual history and
Italian studies. Progress here has been sporadic, but after a long hiatus,
the Commissione per l’Edizione nazionale delle opere di Francesco Pe-
trarca (www.franciscus.unifi.it/Commissione/index.htm), which published
seven volumes between 1926 and 1964, has resumed its activity. Erasmus
initially seems to be another obvious candidate for a traditional critical
edition, which is being provided in this case by Brill, with an international
advisory board supervising the series (www.brill.com/publications/opera-
omnia-desiderii-erasmi-erasmus-opera-omnia). In both cases early printed
editions exist of the Opera omnia: for Petrarch, a Henricpetrine edition
(Basel, 1554), and for Erasmus, editions printed by Froben (Basel, 1538–40)
and Van der Aa (Leiden, 1703–6). But since neo-Latin writers of this
stature continue to attract at least as many readers as most classical authors,
many scholars today feel the need to replace these early printed books with
editions prepared according to modern standards.
This is not the case, however, for most neo-Latin writers. With this
essay in mind, I turned to Katalog 51, Alte Drucke vor 1700 by an antiquar-
ian book dealer from Salzburg, Austria, Johannes Müller. Among his
offerings, we find the following: Niccolò Avancini, Leopoldi Guilielmi
archiducis Austriae . . . virtutes (‘The Virtues of Leopold William, Archduke
of Austria’) (Antwerp: Plantin-Moretus, 1665); Johannes Aventinus,
Annalium Boiorum libri vii (‘Seven Books of the Annals of the Boii’)
(Basel: P. Perna, 1580); Daniel Beckher, Medicus microcosmus (‘The Med-
ical Microcosm’) (Leiden: J. Marcus, 1633); Giovanni Bona, Via compendii
ad Deum, per motus anagogicos, et orationes jaculatorias (‘The Shorter Route
to God, through Anagogical Movements and Rapidly Uttered Speeches’)
 Using Manuscripts and Early Printed Books 381
(Munich: S. Rauch for J. Wagner, 1674); Antony van Dale, Dissertationes
de origine et progressu idolatriae et superstitionum (‘Dissertations on the
Origin and Development of Idolatry and Superstitions’) (Amsterdam:
H. & V. T. Boom, 1696) and Thomas Draxe, Extremi iudicii tuba mon-
itoria (‘The Admonitory Trumpet of the Last Judgment’) (Hanau: Hulsian,
1617). For those interested in the flattery of Renaissance princes, historiog-
raphy in sixteenth-century Germany, the theory and practice of early
modern medicine, witchcraft and exorcism and astronomical foreshadow-
ings of the Last Judgment, these books are well worth reading. But before
we set up a Commission for the National Edition of the Works of Thomas
Draxe, some hard thinking should take place.
In printing, as in other areas of life, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,
so that most scholarly editions today have the same press run as they did
during the incunabular period (i.e., before 1501): 300–700.2 The question,
then, is whether books like those in the paragraph above can attract enough
readers to justify a critical edition disseminated in traditional print form. In
many cases the answer has to be ‘no’, but the question becomes even more
acute in relation to books like the Mutineis (‘Mutineid’) of Francesco
Rococciolo. This work, which is a perfectly competent neo-Latin epic
focused on a series of political and military events that unfolded around
Modena at the beginning of the sixteenth century, was not published until
2006, with the carefully edited text being accompanied three years later by a
lengthy commentary that was prepared with equal skill and effort.3 A great
deal of time, effort and expense was lavished on these books, but one has to
wonder whether it was all worth it: if Rococciolo could not find enough
readers to justify publication among his fellow citizens who lived through
these events, where will readers come from today?
Until the middle of the last century, publication options had not
changed substantially in five hundred years. New technologies for repro-
ducing manuscripts and early printed books, however, offer other options
today. Both manuscripts and early printed books have been reproduced on
microfilm, then on microfiche, for a couple of generations now. This is an
especially appealing option for a neo-Latinist, since it makes possible a
press run, as it were, of one, but the technology is a bit off-putting and
prices have remained stubbornly high. Another possibility is offered
through projects that offer digitized versions of manuscripts and early
printed books. The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich, for example,
is systematically digitizing all its early printed books (www.digitale-samm
2 3
Febvre and Martin 1976: 216–22. Haye 2006, 2009.
382 craig kallendorf
lungen.de/index.html?c=digitale sammlungen&l=en&projekt=). Special
mention should be made here of two large projects: An Analytical Bibliog-
raphy of On-Line Neo-Latin Texts (www.philological.bham.ac.uk/BIBLI
OGRAPHY/INDEX.HTM), maintained by Dana Sutton, which offered
access to almost 43,000 different works in mid-September, 2012; and Early
English Books Online (EEBO, http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home), which
will contain digital facsimiles of 125,000 titles listed in Pollard and Red-
grave’s Short-Title Catalogue (1475–1640), Wing’s Short-Title Catalogue
(1641–1700), the Thomason Tracts (1640–61) and the Early English Tract
Supplement. The neo-Latin section of the Digital Library (http://thelatin
library.com/neo.html) in turn offers texts of works by such canonical
authors as Philip Melanchthon and Isaac Newton along with those of
writers like Gislenus Bultelius and Laurentius Corvinus. Many of these
texts are not critical editions and mechanisms to ensure scholarly quality
are still being developed, but access is free and available to anyone with an
Internet connection.
Digital reproductions of manuscripts and early printed books are a
powerful new resource which all neo-Latinists should embrace eagerly. In
the end, however, the decision as to whether a modern critical edition
should be prepared must be made on a case-by-case basis. A work like
Cristoforo Landino’s Disputationes Camaldulenses (‘Camaldulensian Dispu-
tations’), for example, is of significant interest to historians of Florentine
humanism in general and specialists in the reception of Plato and Virgil in
particular. There are only five textual authorities, all of which can be dated
to within a decade of the composition of the work. One of the four
manuscripts, Vaticanus Urbinas lat. 508, is the dedication copy presented
by Landino to Federico da Montefeltro; the other three come from contem-
porary Florence and the fifth witness is the editio princeps which contains
corrections and changes supplied by Landino himself. In this case the
work is important, the number of textual witnesses is manageable and the
path through them is clear, so Peter Lohe’s decision to prepare a traditional
critical edition was reasonable. The result is a text that was prepared
according to a rational, widely accepted process, accompanied by an appa-
ratus criticus (a collection of variant readings at the bottom of each page) and
a list of references to other authors, primarily classical, that Landino makes
but does not identify explicitly.4 Lohe’s edition is in a series sponsored by
the Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento (www.insr.it/index.php?
id=38), which suggests that other works of neo-Latin literature merit similar
4
Landino 1980.
 Using Manuscripts and Early Printed Books 383
treatment. The Renaissance Society of America has a similar series
(www.brill.com/publications/renaissance-society-america), as does Leuven
University Press (Bibliotheca Latinitatis Novae, www.bln-series.eu/), but
the most extensive collection of neo-Latin texts, offered in scholarly but not
critical editions along with English translations, is The I Tatti Renaissance
Library (ITRL, www.hup.harvard.edu/collection.php?cpk=1145), which
reached its fiftieth volume in less than a decade of existence.
While projects like ITRL confirm that there is a place for the modern
critical edition even in today’s challenging publishing environment, modern
textual theory has offered a new rationale for relying on manuscripts and
early printed editions instead. The traditional model that Lohe used was
developed by Karl Lachmann in the nineteenth century, and it is admirably
suited for classical literature, where almost all the surviving textual evidence
dates from centuries after the work was composed and the circumstances of
initial publication have to be recreated.5 But as Jerome McGann has noted,
the circumstances of textual production and dissemination, along with the
surviving evidence, are quite different in the early modern period. Lach-
mann’s model treats the text as a sort of Platonic form, unchanging as an
expression of its author’s final intention and approachable only through the
rigors of abstract thought. McGann argues, however, that texts are fluid,
changeable both by the author and by a series of other people like editors,
printers and critics in a process that is more akin to the Aristotelian discus-
sion of probabilities than to Platonic dialectic. In other words, texts do not
exist in solemn ontological splendor, but are embedded in society, and each
textual instantiation is the result of one moment in which a series of
relationships (proofreading, censorship, revision) is temporarily frozen.6
Sometimes these forces prevented publication altogether: Petrarch, for
example, released only a few lines of his Africa during his lifetime through
a sort of self-censorship, in which his fear of critical judgment sent him back
again and again to revise the work.7 Indeed Petrarch was a sort of incurable
reviser, so that works like the Secretum, as Hans Baron has shown, contain
layers of changes and reworkings.8 A modern critical edition obscures all
this at the same time as it removes what it has become fashionable to call
the ‘paratext’, things like prefaces, dedications, introductory poems by the
author’s friends in praise of the work at hand and so forth.9 Stripping the
text of this context in a modern critical edition obscures the relationships

5 6 7 8
Kenney 1974. McGann 1983. Petrarch 1926: esp. xxxv–xxxvi. Baron 1985.
9
The term was popularized by Gérard Genette in ‘Introduction to the Paratext’ (Genette 1991: 261),
picking up on a term used in Palimpsestes (Genette 1981: 93).
384 craig kallendorf
through which it was produced. This loss is greater in the cases of some
authors than of others: Erasmus, for example, regularly broke his longer
works apart so he could dedicate each section to someone else, then rededi-
cated works as they went into new editions.10
In many cases, then, there are significant advantages to relying on
manuscripts and early printed books instead of modern critical editions.
In any event, anyone who decides to prepare an edition should not forget
the famous dictum of Paul Oskar Kristeller, that for post-classical works,
two editions are worse than none. What he meant by this is that if
circumstances justify a modern critical edition, go ahead and prepare it,
but be sure no one else is working on the same project, for if two editions
of the same obscure work are published, no one will know which one to
cite and half the collective effort will have been wasted.

Resources for the Study of Manuscripts and Early Printed Books

A good many resources exist to facilitate work with manuscripts and early
printed books. With manuscripts, the first problem is simply being able to
read them, since a good number of medieval scripts, especially those
written rapidly in informal contexts, are quite different from what the
modern eye is used to and therefore difficult for us to read, at least initially.
Fortunately most of what the neo-Latinist is likely to encounter in the
study of literary texts does not fall into this class. As part of their effort to
revive the past, Renaissance humanists effected a handwriting reform at the
beginning of the fifteenth century that banished the ‘Gothic’ script that
they associated with the barbarism of the Middle Ages. They made a big
mistake here, in that the script they replaced it with because they thought
it was used in antiquity in fact was Carolingian, but for us this is a felix
culpa, in the sense that the bookhands from the time of Charlemagne are
quite easy to read. Some manuscripts were also written in humanist
cursive, but this is also comparatively easy to read, with the letters clearly
divided and spaced out reasonably well. What is more, after the invention
of printing, these two scripts served as the foundation for the fonts in
which Latin books have been printed throughout most of Europe for five
hundred years. The revived Carolingian bookhand is what we know as
‘roman’, and the humanist cursive is what we call ‘italic’.11

10
Kallendorf 1997.
11
The classic account of the handwriting revolution, Ullman 1960, should be supplemented by de la
Mare 1973.
 Using Manuscripts and Early Printed Books 385
When it comes to finding manuscripts containing works of neo-Latin
literature, the problems become more serious. The basic difficulty is that
there is no single reference work that contains everything one might want
to know. One should start with series like the Inventari dei manoscritti delle
biblioteche d’Italia, begun by Giuseppe Mazzatinti at the end of the
nineteenth century, which contains references to a good many works of
neo-Latin literature found in Italian libraries. Large national libraries like
the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the British Library have issued
catalogues of their holdings that contain information on thousands of
relevant manuscripts, and a good number of libraries, both large and small,
offer online inventories of at least part of their manuscript collections.
In some cases, like that of Poliziano, we have books like Ida Maïer’s Les
manuscrits d’Ange Politien that identify all the manuscripts containing the
works of a particular author and provide detailed descriptions of them.12
In the end one is still left wishing for something more systematic. The best
solution at this point is to begin with Paul Oskar Kristeller’s Latin
Manuscript Books before 1600,13 which proceeds library by library and lists
the resources available for finding the manuscripts in each place. Getting
access to all these resources is an issue, even for someone working at the
best of research libraries, but F. Edward Cranz’s ‘Microfilm Corpus of the
Indexes to Printed Catalogues of Latin Manuscripts before 1600 ad’ offers
38 reels of microfilm containing the indexes to the printed inventories in
Kristeller’s guide, allowing one to search for a particular author and narrow
down the number of manuscript catalogues that have to be consulted.
Many manuscript inventories remain unpublished, but here again, there is
a solution, with the 340 reels of Cranz’s ‘Microfilm Corpus of Unpub-
lished Inventories of Latin Manuscripts through 1600 ad’ making this
material accessible. And finally there is one of the crowning achievements
of late twentieth-century scholarship, Paul Oskar Kristeller’s monumental
Iter Italicum, whose subtitle explains that it provides ‘a finding list of
uncatalogued or incompletely catalogued humanistic manuscripts of the
Renaissance in Italian and other libraries’.14 This resource can be consulted
through the six print volumes, a CD-ROM, or electronically.
Early printed books are easier to work with, since access can be obtained
through a good number of large-scale projects, many of which are available
online. The Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (www.bl.uk/catalogues/
istc/) offers information about books printed before 1501, while the
Universal Short Title Catalogue (http://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/~ustc/) will
12 13 14
Maïer 1965. Kristeller 1965. Kristeller 1963–1992.
386 craig kallendorf
incorporate this material and entries from various national bibliographical
projects into information on over 350,000 separate editions published
through the end of the sixteenth century. Important national databases
exist for France (Catalogue collectif de France, http://ccfr.bnf.fr/por
tailccfr/jsp/index.jsp), Italy (OPAC SBN, www.sbn.it/opacsbn/opac/iccu/
free.jsp), Spain (Catálogo colectivo del patrimonio bibliográfico español,
http://ccpb opac.mcu.es/cgi-brs/CCPB/abnetopac/O9173/IDa043b9ff?
ACC=101), the British Isles (English Short Title Catalogue, http://estc.bl
.uk/F/?func=file&file name=login-bl-estc), the Netherlands (Short Title
Catalogue Netherlands, www.kb.nl/en/organisation/research-expertise/
for-libraries/short-title-catalogue-netherlands-stcn) and Flemish-speaking
Belgium (Short Title Catalogue Flanders, www.vlaamse-erfgoedbibliotheek
.be/en/oude-drukken). Seventeenth-century German Books are most easily
accessed through VD-17, Das Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachraum
erschienenen Drucke des 17. Jahrhunderts (www.vd17.de/). Books in eastern
and central European libraries are more difficult to find, but more and more
individual libraries from the area are putting their catalogues of early printed
editions online.
Neo-Latinists should not forget that antiquarian booksellers also provide
an important source of information about early printed books. While most
incunables (books printed before 1501), for example, had a press run of
several hundred copies, the most frequently recurring number of surviving
copies is one.15 Statistics generated from the Universal Short Title Catalogue
suggest that, for the sixteenth century, the number rises to four or five; but
again, there are hundreds of editions whose existence can be confirmed
through only one surviving copy. Many times that one copy comes on the
market through an antiquarian bookseller, so that the neo-Latinist would be
well advised to look regularly through the catalogues of dealers like Maggs
and Quaritch in London, Antiquariaat Forum in the Netherlands and
Erasmushaus in Switzerland for new finds. Dealers like those at Libreria
Philobiblon in Milan and Rome and Bruce McKittrick Rare Books in
Philadelphia are also first-rate scholars whose catalogue descriptions provide
valuable information about the books they sell. Unfortunately prices for
early printed books have risen considerably in the last couple of decades, but
it is still possible to get an interesting volume of neo-Latin literature that was
published shortly after it was written for three or four hundred pounds,
sometimes less, from a dealer, and often for considerably less at auction.
Christie’s and Sotheby’s have traditionally dominated the high-end market,
15
Green, McIntyre and Needham 2001.
 Using Manuscripts and Early Printed Books 387
but Swann Galleries and Bloomsbury Auctions regularly offer attractive
items at appealing prices, and there are other galleries throughout Europe
and the United States that deal in books that are less expensive yet.

How to Use an Early Printed Book: A Case Study

As an example of how manuscripts and early printed books can be used in neo-
Latin scholarship, I would like to look at the first seven lines of a poem, Maffeo
Vegio’s thirteenth book to the Aeneid (see the Appendix to this chapter). This
work was written in 1428 as a supplement to Virgil’s epic, in an effort to tie up
what the twenty-one-year-old poet saw as the loose ends left dangling in the
original. Trying to complete a poem that Virgil left finished at his death, except
for some final stylistic polishing, may initially seem like a curious thing to do,
but in fact Vegio’s Book 13 is typical in many ways of neo-Latin literature in
general, for it is bound closely to the Latin literature of antiquity, which it seeks
to reproduce and extend in terms of both style and content.
The poem can be read in a modern critical edition prepared by Bernd
Schneider in the mid-eighties. Schneider is a fine scholar, but what has
happened here depicts well the challenges faced by modern scholars who
must use manuscripts and early printed editions. Schneider’s work with the
manuscripts shows that the editio princeps (first printed edition) comes from a
particularly corrupt part of the tradition, which confirms that Anna Cox
Brinton’s edition, which was published in 1930 and based on it but is still in
print, should not be used any longer. Schneider lists twenty-one manuscripts
in the preface to his edition, but unfortunately the full number is more than
twice that. What is more, how the manuscripts should be handled is far less
clear than it was with the Disputationes Camaldulenses. There has been a
general consensus for over a hundred years that two Vatican manuscripts, Vat.
Lat. 1668 and 1669, are particularly good witnesses for Book 13, but neither is
an autograph and both show signs of contamination, so it is difficult both to
construct a stemma that shows the relationship of all the surviving manu-
scripts with one another and to assign relative weights to their variant
readings. As a result, the text is more fluid than the stemma and apparatus
criticus (the list of variant readings, the first block below the text in the
appendix to this chapter) would lead us to believe.16 This is a common
problem in traditionally prepared critical editions of neo-Latin texts.

16
Schneider 1985, with the discussion of the manuscripts on 24–39. See also my review of this edition
(Kallendorf 1987). Schneider’s edition replaces Brinton 1930. A translation into modern English can
be found at Vegio 2004: 3–31.
388 craig kallendorf
Schneider’s second apparatus, his list of textual parallels, is a master-
piece, and it is this list at which I wish to look more closely. As the second
block below the text in Appendix 1 shows, Vegio has constructed his poem
with his gaze fixed constantly on classical Latin poetry. This is an aspect of
neo-Latin literature that can be off-putting to modern readers, swept up as
we are by Romantic notions of individuality and creativity that put a
premium on doing something different from what past poets have done,
not something that is bound inextricably to their work. Yet Vegio has done
his job well, and so has his editor, who has provided the tools by which the
modern reader can appreciate the neo-Latin poem on its own terms.
Schneider’s second apparatus is valuable for a second reason as well, for
it suggests not only that standards for judging poetry have changed
through time, but also that how poetry was read has changed as well.
What is going on here is a little less straightforward and requires that we
step aside for a moment and look at a couple of carefully chosen early
printed books. Since for obvious reasons, most of Vegio’s references are to
Virgil, I would like to look briefly at a copy of Virgil published in Leipzig
in 1581 by Joannes Steinman, now in a private collection. An early reader
has gone through this book and underlined selected passages. In Aeneid 6,
for example, this reader underlined Tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior
ito / Quam tua te fortuna sinet (‘Do not relent before distress, but be / far
bolder than your fortune would permit’, Aen. 6.95–6),17 then a longer
passage:
facilis descensus Averni:
Noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis:
Sed revocare gradum, superasque evadere ad auras,
Hoc opus, hic labor est. pauci, quos aequus amavit
Iuppiter, aut ardens evexit ad aethera virtus,
Diis geniti, potuere
(easy
the way that leads into Avernus: day
and night the door of darkest Dis is open.
But to recall your steps, to rise again
into the upper air: that is the labor;
that is the task. A few, whom Jupiter
has loved in kindness or whom blazing worth
has raised to the heaven as gods’ sons, returned.)
(Aen. 6.126 31)

17
Translations of passages from the Aeneid are from Mandelbaum 1972.
 Using Manuscripts and Early Printed Books 389
Then later, he underlined Discite iustitiam moniti, et non temnere divos
(‘Be warned, learn justice, do not scorn the gods’, Aen. 6.620). Precisely
the same lines are underlined in another book in the same private collec-
tion, a copy of the 1567 Frankfurt edition. This reader has added what are
called ‘indexing notes’ next to the underlined passages, where we see key
words like avarus (‘greedy’) next to line 610, tyrannus (‘tyrant’) next to line
623, incestuosi (‘the incestuous’) next to 624 and so forth (f. 140v). Both of
these readers are doing the same thing: searching for easily remembered
expressions of moral wisdom, underlining them for future reference and
adding a key word to remind them why they had marked the passage.
These examples were chosen for their moral content, but the early reader
of the Frankfurt edition also marked passages whose style he admired,
tagging the similes at Aen. 5.273–80 (f. 118v) and 5.588–91 (f. 124v) and the
hypallages (the transfer of a description from the word it should describe to
another one) in Aen. 5.458–9 (f. 122r) and 5.500–1 (f. 122v) and putting the
names of the figures in the margin as ‘indexing notes’.
Other early printed books show us that there is a second step to this
reading practice. If we turn, for example, to Jean Petit’s P. Virgilii Maronis
opera in locos communes . . . digesta (‘The Works of Publius Virgilius
Maro, Distributed into Commonplaces’), published in Lyons by Jean
Pillehotte in 1587, we find what might initially strike us as a curious thing,
a book with lines from Virgil ranged out below headings like aetas aurea
(‘golden age’), aetas ferrea (‘iron age’), amare (‘to love’), amicus (‘friend’),
arma (‘arms’) and so forth. But if we think about the markings in the early
printed editions of Virgil mentioned above, what Petit has done begins to
make sense. Under avaritia (‘greed’) for example, we find Aen. 6.610, Aut
qui divitiis soli incubuere repertis (‘And here are those who . . . had brooded
all alone on new-won treasure’), which was accompanied by the ‘indexing
note’ avarus (‘greedy’) in the Frankfurt edition of Virgil. The line with the
warning to learn justice and not to scorn the gods (Aen. 6.620), which was
underlined in the Leipzig edition, is listed under the heading iustitia
(‘justice’) in Petit’s commonplace book (p. 568), while the lines promising
apotheosis for those possessing virtus (‘virtue’, Aen. 6.129–31) are listed
under that heading (p. 1005). In other words, in commonplace books like
these – and there are a great many examples just like this one – the
‘indexing notes’ that have been added in the margins of classical texts have
become the headings and the underlined passages from Virgil have been
listed out below them.
Marking passages in classical texts, and then rearranging them in com-
monplace books, are not the end of Renaissance reading practices, but a
390 craig kallendorf
means. The end is the production of a new work of literature, like Maffeo
Vegio’s Book 13. To produce a poem like this, writers like Vegio took what
they found valuable in ancient literature, the passages that were memorable
for their moral sentiments or their stylistic grace, and wove them into the
works they created, using the headings of their commonplace books to find
the right line for the right place in the new poem.18 Underline, reorganize
and reuse – this is the process that produced poems like Vegio’s Book 13,
and hundreds of other neo-Latin works as well.

Conclusion
As the example of Vegio’s Book 13 has shown, works of neo-Latin literature
require some understanding of manuscripts and early printed books to be
understood. Even when a modern critical edition exists, it is important to
know something about the manuscripts and early printed books on which
it is based to be able to work with it successfully. What is more, parts of
such an edition, like the apparatus containing parallel passages from
classical literature, take on an added richness and texture when we under-
stand how neo-Latin writers worked. This process, in turn, only makes
sense when we understand how manuscripts and early printed books were
read by the neo-Latin writers who broke them apart, reorganized them and
reused the pieces in original compositions of their own.
As the study of neo-Latin literature enters the twenty-first century, it is
worth thinking about how scholarship in the field is generally conducted
and what might be done differently. Research has only begun to exploit the
possibilities offered by new technologies, especially those based on the
Internet, both to find books and to reproduce them more widely than
before. New theories of textual editing have challenged the long domin-
ance of the traditional model used by classicists, but scholars have just
begun to think through the consequences of this challenge. Paradoxically,
at the centre of the opportunities offered by new technologies are old
objects, the manuscripts and early printed editions that have brought the
works of neo-Latin literature down to us. It is now possible to find this
material far more easily than it was a generation or two ago, and to explore
how it might be used for a new sort of edition in which multiple versions
in early modern documents can be placed side-by-side on a computer

18
This process is also described in educational treatises of the day; see for example Battista Guarino’s
‘A Program of Teaching and Learning’ (Kallendorf 2002: 295). For a discussion of how this worked
in the classroom, see Kallendorf 2013.
 Using Manuscripts and Early Printed Books 391
screen and consulted with a click of a mouse, by far more people than ever
had access to the originals. Much remains to be done, and manuscripts and
early printed books are at the top of this agenda.

FURTHER READING
For information on the handwriting of humanist manuscripts, see Ullman 1960
and de la Mare 1973, while Kristeller 1965 and 1963 92 provide guidance on how
to find manuscripts containing neo Latin texts. On early printed books in general,
see Febvre and Martin 1976. The Univeral Short Title Catalogue offers easy access
to information on over 350,000 early printed books, while EEBO and Sutton offer
extensive selections of neo Latin printed books in digital form. Contrasting views
about preparing a text may be found in Kenney 1974 and McGann 1983.
Renaissance reading practices are discussed in Kallendorf 2015.
 Appendix

The block of text presented here, the first seven lines of Maffeo Vegio’s
Book 13, along with the textual apparatus and the list of parallel passages, is
from Schneider’s edition. I have replaced his German translation with that
of Thomas Twyne, which was first published in 1584 and gives a period
flavor to the Latin text, as printed in Brinton’s edition.

Text
1 Turnus ut extremo devictus Marte profudit
effugientem animam medioque sub agmine victor
magnanimus stetit Aeneas, Mavortius heros,
obstupuere omnes gemitumque dedere Latini,
et durum ex alto revomentes corde dolorem
6 concussis cecidere animis, ceu frondibus ingens
silva solet lapsis boreali impulsa tumultu.
(When Turnus in this finall fight downethrowne, his flittring ghost
Had yeelded up unto the aire, in middest of all the host
Aeneas valient victour stands, god Mavors champion bold.
The Latines stoynisht standing, from their hartes great groanes unfold,
And deepely from their inward thoughts revolving cause of care,
Their daunted minds they do let fall; Like as thick woods that are
Of bignesse huge, lament their losse when first their leaves do fall
Through furious force of northren blastes, of greene that spoiles them all.)

Textual Variants
1 devictus] confectus ε (devictus L2 s. l.) 2 sub] ex ε (sub H2 s. l.) 5
removentes] N 7 solet] dolet Fθe: sonat HL et v. l. M

392
 Using Manuscripts and Early Printed Books 393

Parallel Passages
1 Aen. 9,47 ‘Turnus ut’ ante volans tardum praecesserat agmen; 12,1 sq.
‘Turnus ut’ infractos adverso ‘Marte’ Latinos / deficisse videt; 12,324 Turnus
ut Aenean cedentem ex agmine vidit 1 – 2 Aen. 1,98 tuaque animam hanc
effundere dextra; Lucan. 3,623 ‘effugientem animam’ lassos collegit in artus
2 Aen. 9,28 ‘medio’ dux ‘agmine’ Turnus; 9,728 sq. qui Rutulum in ‘medio’
non ‘agmine’ regem / viderit; 11,762 qua se cumque furens ‘medio’ tulit
‘agmine’ virgo; Lucan. 1,245 celsus ‘medio’ conspectus in ‘agmine’ Caesar 3
Aen. 1,260. 9,204 ‘magnanimum’ Aenean; 5,17 ‘magnanime’ Aenea; cf.
5,407. 10,771 4 Ov. met. 8,616. 765. 12,18 ‘obstipuere omnes’;
georg. 4,350sq. omnes / ‘obstipuere’; Aen. 2,120. 5,404 ‘obstipuere’ animi;
8,530; 9,123 ‘obstipuere’ animis; Aen. 2,53 ‘gemitumque dedere’; Ov.
met. 15, 612 demisere oculos omnes gemitumque dedere 5 Aen. 1, 209 pre-
mit altum ‘corde dolorem’; Ov. met. 2,621 – 23 tum vero gemitus . . . / alto
de corde petitos / edidit; - Aen. 5,182 salsos rident ‘revomentem’ pectore
fluctus; cf. Sil. 10, 325 6 Aen. 3,260 ‘cecidere animi’, 9,498 hoc fletu concussi
‘animi’; Ov. pont. 2,3,50 animi non cecidere tui 6 sq. Aen. 7,676 ‘ingens /
silva’; Ov. ars 3, 161 sq. raptique aetate capilli / ut Borea frondes excutiente
cadunt
 chapter 23

Editing Neo-Latin Literature

Keith Sidwell

Introduction
This chapter will briefly discuss the general state of publishing in the area
of neo-Latin literature, enquire into the issue of what additional textual
resources might be deemed necessary and how their selection might be
made, and finally outline briefly the central principles involved in the
production of such editions. Although these issues have largely been well
addressed elsewhere, especially by IJsewijn and Sacré,1 which should be a
fundamental starting-point for those to whom this area is of interest, what
is said here will rely heavily upon the author’s own experience of editing
seventeenth-century Irish poetic texts. This experience does not change
any fundamentals, but may serve to introduce the subject from a different
perspective.

What Kinds of Texts Are out There?

As IJsewijn and Sacré note, neo-Latin literature, though a particular
‘growth area’ in the past twenty years, was also a focus of interest for many
scholars before the modern era.2 Even on Europe’s periphery, eagerness to
preserve knowledge of a land’s literary heritage led very early to the
compilation of annotated bibliographies, of the sort represented by James
Ware’s De scriptoribus Hiberniae (1639), which was revised and enlarged by
Walter Harris in 1739–46. Texts of the collected works of major authors
from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries were published as early as
the eighteenth century (e.g. J. Clericus’ Erasmus, Leiden 1703–7; the
‘Letters’ of Ambrogio Traversari, Florence 1759). Despite the development
of a haughty attitude towards works of non-classical Latin writers on the
part of the increasing cohort of professional students of the ancient world

1 2
IJsewijn and Sacré 1998: 434–501. IJsewijn and Sacré 1998: 502–7.

394
 Editing Neo-Latin Literature 395
during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, their contemporaries
who were historians of the early modern period and specialists in the art
or vernacular literatures of this time began to recognize the importance of
such Latin works. Good examples of texts resulting from these sources
of interest can be found in the edition of the history of Ireland by Philip
O’Sullivan-Beare (Historiae Catholicae Iberniae Compendium, 1621) by
Matthew Kelly (Dublin 1850), of the letters of Enea Silvio Piccolomini
(Pope Pius II) by R. Wolkan for Fontes rerum Austriacarum (Vienna,
1909–18), and the series entitled Nuova collezione di testi umanistici inediti
o rari published under the auspices of the Scuola Normale Superiore di
Pisa, of which C. Grayson’s text of Leon Battista Alberti’s Musca and Vita
S. Potiti (Florence 1954) was number 10.
Over the last ten years or so, new series, dedicated to the production of
critical editions of neo-Latin texts, have begun to emerge, in the context,
however, of new or renewed institutional interest in the phenomenon of neo-
Latin itself. Examples are Supplementa humanistica Lovaniensia produced by
the Seminarium Philologiae Humanisticae at the Katholieke Universiteit
Leuven since 1978, Noctes Neolatinae: Neo-Latin Texts and Studies, a series
of supplements to Neulateinisches Jahrbuch, published under the auspices of
Bonn University’s Abteilung für Griechische und Lateinische Philologie since
2001, the Harvard I Tatti Renaissance Library, under the general editorship of
Professor of History James Hankins, which began publication in 2001 and
now runs to more than fifty volumes, and Officina Neolatina: Selected
Writings from the Neo-Latin World, announced by Brepols Publishers in
2007 and with its first text published in 2011.3 Individual presses (often
associated with universities which have strong research interests in neo-
Latin Studies) also occasionally publish critical texts of neo-Latin authors.
Instances are the texts of Emmanuel Swedenborg edited by Hans Helander
and published in Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis,4 texts from the project on the
neo-Latin drama of the University of Salzburg, under the title Musae Bene-
dictinae Salisburgenses,5 Florian Schaffenrath and Stefan Tilg’s Achilles in
Tirol. Der ‘bayerische Rummel’ 1703 in der ‘Epitome rerum Œnovallensium’,6
and The Zoilomastix of Philip O’Sullivan-Beare, edited by Denis O’Sullivan
(arising from the Renaissance Latin Writers of Ireland project at the Centre
for Neo-Latin Studies at University College Cork).7 These editions present,
however, seriously divergent choices in what support material to offer to the

3
Edwards and Sidwell 2012. Unfortunately, this series is currently suspended.
4 5
Helander 1985, 1988 and 1995. Witek 2001; Oberparleiter 2004.
6 7
Schaffenrath and Tilg 2004. O’Sullivan 2009.
396 keith sidwell
reader, some opting only for critical text plus translation, others for text,
translation and notes, and relatively few for the whole panoply of linguistic
apparatus and commentary usual for classical texts.
In addition to standard printed editions, the arrival of the Internet has
facilitated the publication of many digital versions of texts, sometimes
(as for example in EEBO) in facsimile, sometimes in digital transcription
(Renaissance Latin Texts of Ireland). These do not represent critical edi-
tions, but nonetheless have increased exponentially the amount of neo-
Latin textual material available for consultation without the vast expense
of travel. Dana F. Sutton has produced a useful bibliography of these
resources, with direct links (www.philological.bham.ac.uk/bibliography:
An Analytic Bibliography of On-line Neo-Latin Texts, University of
California, Irvine). A new initiative, The Library of Digital Latin Texts,
a joint research project of the Society for Classical Studies, the Medieval
Academy of America and the Renaissance Society of America, hosted by
the University of Oklahoma, directed by Samuel J. Huskey and funded
by the Mellon Foundation, is now trying to open up a new direction in
the digitization of Latin texts. The project aims to establish a site for
new digital editions of Latin texts (http://digitallatin.org/). It is currently
exploring ways of encouraging scholars to publish in its series, which will
include neo-Latin texts. It does seem very likely, given the relatively small
groups of specialists who will use such editions and the probability that in
the future fewer and fewer conventional publishers will risk their capital in
such a restricted market, that digital production of this kind will become a
more and more promising route for scholars in the field to take.

What Kinds of Texts Do We Need?

However, the field of neo-Latin is almost incomprehensibly vast. Figures
in Waquet’s Latin ou l’empire d’un signe suggest that even at the beginning
of the eighteenth century, books in Latin still accounted for the majority
of all printed output. And while vernacular languages may have effectively
(though by no means exclusively) taken over in the realm of literature
by the end of the seventeenth century, nonetheless Latin continued to be
the preferred medium of scholarship well into the nineteenth (and in
some places, well into the twentieth), as well as the (belligerent) choice for
debate and written reports in the parliaments of Croatia and Hungary.
We cannot hope to produce critical editions of all this material, partly
because of its vast bulk, partly because the numbers of properly qualified
scholars of Latin is continually falling, partly because of a persisting
 Editing Neo-Latin Literature 397
preference on the part of many departments of classical philology (who
almost exclusively still are the trainers of Latinists) to encourage their
graduate students to tackle editions of classical authors (already, one
would think, well enough provided for after several hundred years of
effort) rather than to contribute to an area of reception studies in which
their knowledge of classical Latinity is badly needed and where it would
become necessarily broader (because the canon utilized by neo-Latin
authors is so broad). Three interlinked questions arise, therefore: which
texts ought we to be prioritizing, for what audiences, and who is to
produce them?
A major consideration in answering the first question is the tendency for
neo-Latinists as a body to regard literary texts (poetry, history, drama,
philosophy, fiction) as their proper focus of attention. The reasons why
they do this are rooted, of course, in the history of university disciplines:
interest in neo-Latin texts has arisen principally out of an interest in the
reception of classical literature, and in particular its links with and relation
to the emerging vernacular literatures of the West from the fourteenth
century onwards. This is why there are far more critical editions of Italian
Renaissance texts of the fifteenth century than of later periods (exceptions
being made for such luminaries as Erasmus and Scaliger). The relatively
recent broadening of interest in neo-Latin as a whole, seen in the establish-
ment of academic units such as the Seminarium Philologiae Humanisticae
at Leuven, has tended to be built upon this essentially literary model. Signs
that this restrictive approach is now altering towards an inclusion of all
Latin material can be seen in the section of IJsewijn and Sacré 1998 on the
literature of scientific disciplines and by Helander’s statement of principle
in Symbolae Osloenses.8
Nonetheless, if the phenomenon of neo-Latin as a whole has begun to
take on the form of a broader enquiry into intellectual history, in practice
its study tends still to be concentrated around somewhat more restricted
themes, both because of the way in which funding for research operates
(i.e. within national boudaries: though the European Research Council
now offers for Europeans a better chance of constructing more inter-
national projects), and because universities tend to have specific sets of
research strengths or specific local interests around which they build their
neo-Latin projects. Though it is by no means the only way to make choices
about which texts to edit critically, it seems a reasonable basic principle, to
avoid fragmentation and lack of general intellectual cohesion, that editors
8
IJsewijn and Sacré 1998: 312–61. Helander 2001.
398 keith sidwell
should attach themselves to one of these projects or start one themselves,
to which their chosen text will contribute in a cumulative way. I have in
mind examples such as the Database of Nordic Neo-Latin Literature
(www.uib.no/neolatin/), the Salzburg Benedictine Drama project of
Petersmann and Witek at the University of Salzburg, Renaissance Latin
Texts of Ireland, established by myself at University College Cork and now
run by Jason Harris, and the more recently established Ludwig Boltzmann
Insitute for Neo-Latin Studies at the University of Innsbruck, which is
running a variety of research programmes simultaneously, including
the role of Latin in the Hapsburg Empire, Catholic school drama of the
eighteenth century and hymnography from the sixteenth to the eighteenth
century. In all of these cases, the production of critical editions runs
parallel with more broadly historical and cultural commentary, to provide
a platform for better understanding of the wider context within which
these Latin texts were produced, as well as to facilitate access to the most
important of them to non-Latinists who are students of their contempor-
ary culture. Gilbert Highet’s criticism of the Ph.D. system, with its
concentration on the isolated study, under the pretence of producing
‘bricks for the cathedral of knowledge’ is no less apt now than it was when
he made it: ‘brick-making does not produce architects’.9 What we require,
then, for our ‘cathedral’ of neo-Latin knowledge are not isolated texts, but
texts associated with wider projects, where historical and cultural analysis
can move hand in hand with the task of editing.
This last set of considerations helps us to identify the parameters for an
answer to our second question. Since neo-Latin texts are products of their
surrounding culture, however much they were produced and consumed
originally by an educated elite, one crucial audience for editions of these
texts must assuredly be those scholars and students whose focus of
attention is the period when such texts were produced, be they intellec-
tual historians, historians of science, art historians, students of vernacular
literature, historical geographers or historians of religion. The Italian
Renaissance, which makes no sense at all without close attention to its
Latin writings and its study of Greek texts in the original language, is a
good example of an area in which neo-Latin text editions have long been
produced (by scholars of Italian culture) and where, albeit belatedly, the
English-speaking world has now begun to be provided with a series of
accessible texts of the most important Latin works (I Tatti Renaissance
Library). A major goal of Renaissance Latin Texts of Ireland is the
9
Highet 1967: 499.
 Editing Neo-Latin Literature 399
provision of such a series for the major products of Irish Latin writers for
historians and specialists in the literature of Ireland (both English and
Irish (Gaeilge)). Classicists should not, however, be indifferent. With the
rise in ‘reception studies’ in recent years, special attention ought to be
being paid by a group of individuals who have been trained in philology
to the tradition which nourished the studies they pursue, and where
quite often the roots of modern orthodoxies (not necessarily correct)
are to be discovered. Many of the literary neo-Latin works, indeed,
offer remarkable insights also into the reception and reuse of classical
literature, often at a very profound level. An example might be the
so-called Poema de Hibernia, a long hexameter poem about the Williamite
War in Ireland (1688–91), written by a highly educated member of the losing
Irish Jacobite elite on the model of Lucan’s Bellum civile.
Let us turn now to our third question: who is to produce such editions?
Editing Latin texts requires a very particular – and increasingly rare – set of
skills. The obvious one is a first-rate knowledge of Latin, which is still most
often acquired through courses offered by what in the English-speaking
world are known as ‘Classics departments’. Indeed, in the past, neo-Latin
editions were always produced by scholars who had had serious training
in Latin, but that was because Latin was a sine qua non of pre-university
training until a generation ago and a required university course at some
level for many contiguous subjects, such as English, History and Romance
Philology. With the abandonment everywhere in the English-speaking
world of Latin as a required secondary school subject and the extraordin-
arily short-sighted lack of support for classical philology by many of
the early-modern disciplines in many universities, the training in Latin
philology of early-modernists has suffered general decline. Moreover, the
broadening of the curriculum in Classics outward from philology towards
a more all-encompassing understanding of the ancient world and its
cultures, while an excellent thing in itself, has tended to contribute (along
with the fact that students are often obliged to begin their study of Latin
and Greek at university) to a lessening of focus upon strictly philological
skills. This situation does require attention and may perhaps be amelior-
ated by collaborative action between departments of Classics and early
modern specialists.
At present, however, it appears to be the case that where such collabor-
ation is absent, those with the philogical skills to undertake editing neo-
Latin texts will likely have been trained in Classics departments or by
Classics departments (though there will be exceptions). They will not
necessarily, however, be equipped with the understanding of the early
400 keith sidwell
modern culture to which their chosen text belongs. Hence, although the
philological aspects of the edition must necessarily fall upon the shoul-
ders of the philologist (though not always without aid, as we shall see),
contextualization and commentary may need to be provided by a collab-
orator specializing in the text’s period. The Ph.D. training offered in
humanities, of course, militates against multiple authorship, but given
that few texts are small enough to be edited in full for a dissertation, this
should not prevent those who edit a neo-Latin text for a Ph.D. qualifica-
tion from seeking a collaborator for a published edition.

Editorial Principles 1: What Is ‘The Text’?

For a classicist, this question is hardly of importance, since the goal of
editors is ‘to get back as nearly as possible to the words intended by the
writer’, but there is no access for any ancient work to material which
originated with the writer himself or even in his lifetime. However, once
autograph manuscripts become available, as they often do for early Quat-
trocento works, or we find multiple editions overseen by the author, as
with Erasmus in the sixteenth century, for example, it becomes clear that
the classicist’s mantra is an oversimplification. The writer may revise his
work either by corrections on the manuscript (see Philip O’Sullivan-
Beare’s Zoilomastix, especially book 1) or by a complete rewriting, which
may reflect different periods of his life and different political or personal
views or goals. For example, Lilio Tifernate, author of a very widely
diffused translation of Lucian’s Verae Narrationes, appears to have revisited
his version a number of times, after producing a trial text of Book 1 in the
late 1430s. This led its editors Dapelo and Zoppelli to a decision to present
their main text as a collation of the two main branches of the textual
tradition, but to print the whole of the earlier draft (of book 1) at a lower
level on the same page, to allow scholars to see instantly what changes the
author made in his revisions.10 A printed text may be expanded (as with
progressive additions to Erasmus’ Adagia and Colloquia), or errors cor-
rected (often several times, as in the ‘Additional Poems’ appended to
Dermot O’Meara’s Ormonius). In all such cases, the editor must seek to
represent the relationship between the various versions as accurately as
possible. In extreme conditions, if an apparatus cannot adequately be
made to provide such information so as to allow the reader to choose
which version to read, then either the edition should print all the different
10
Dapelo and Zoppelli 1998: 134–92. For other examples, see IJsewijn and Sacré 1998: 463–4.
 Editing Neo-Latin Literature 401
versions (whether in chronological sequence or in tabular form) or, if the
texts differ mainly in passages or words added or deleted, they should
be distinguished typographically (as in the case of the modern Vatican
edition of Enea Silvio Piccolomini’s Commentarii, where the published
sixteenth-century edition had deliberately censored and bowdlerized Pope
Pius’ original text).

Editorial Principles 2: Establishing the Text

Where only manuscripts exist, the editor will be aided by following the
procedures established long since by classical philologists for the creation of
a stemma, which helps to establish the relationships between them.11
However, the one clear difference which must be kept in mind is the
possibility of identifying an autograph, which must clearly be given
priority. This is more easily done, of course, for a well-studied period like
the Italian Quattrocento, where the handwriting of the main humanists
has been identified.
For most printed editions, the autograph manuscript was used during
the process of typesetting and correction and then discarded. Hence,
editing a printed text from the second half of the fifteenth century onwards
requires in most cases collection and a close study of the available editions.
There can be surprises even when apparently identical copies are examined
closely. In the case of the ‘Additional Poems’ in O’Meara’s Ormonius,
grammatical and metrical errors have been corrected in the octavos of later
copies, even though the text of the poem itself and its introductory
material have not been altered. A decision had to be made about the likely
role of the author himself in these corrections before it was clear which text
to prioritize. A full conspectus of editions must therefore be given along
with an account of their relationship with each other.

Editorial Principles 3: Orthography, Punctuation and Typography

One of the most contentious questions to be answered by the editor of a
neo-Latin text is about whether or not to ‘normalize’ spelling and punctu-
tion, that is to present the Latin text according to the conventions now
accepted for classical Latin. As regards punctuation, early modern texts

11
Maas 1958. Deligiannis’ edition of some early Quattrocento Latin translations of the Greek author
Lucian is an excellent example of these principles put into practice for neo-Latin texts with multiple
manuscripts (Deligiannis 2006).
402 keith sidwell
mostly use a system which attempts to break up sentences according
to rhetorical units. For example, the scribe of Gilbert ms. 141 writes at Poema
de Hibernia 1.177–8: Hoc, Jacobe, Tibi, Lex Exclusiva, rogante,/ Figitur
(‘At this man’s request, James, the Exclusion Bill is fixed against thee’).
The proliferation of commas – perfectly rational from the viewpoint of the
seventeenth-century scribe – will do nothing to help, and everything to
distract, the modern reader, who would see the structure better here if only
the vocative Jacobe were marked off. It does not seem unreasonable,
therefore, to allow modern punctuation conventions (which in any case
differ among different modern languages) to be used in neo-Latin editions.
One might think that the same could be said of spelling, and indeed this
has been argued strongly by Deitz.12 However, even he gives a number of
cases where exceptions should be made, viz. (1) where the author makes
allusions to an etymology which is reflected in the spelling; (2) where the
author uses a ‘word, figure or spelling which is wrong according to our
standards, that word must be retained if it is such that the author could not
have known the right one’;13 (3) neologisms. To (1), a partial response is
that in any case this category must be extended to cover all spellings to
which false etymologies were attached in the early modern period, since
these were regularly taught, they were discussed in the major dictionaries
of the period (e.g. in the various editions of Calepinus) and there is no way
of knowing how much in any individual instance the author expected
his reader to supply the etymology. An example might be the spelling
Alecto for the Virgilian Fury, as against the modern convention Allecto: the
spelling with one ‘l’ reflects a false etymology from Greek (alpha privative
plus lēgō , ‘I desist’). To (2), one might say that, even if one agrees in
principle that the editor ought to know in precise detail where in the
history of philological enquiry the text is to be placed, the requirement
loads onto the scholar who wishes to publish this side of the next millen-
nium too great a burden of investigation, investigation which might still
for reasons not the scholar’s fault (such as the discovery of new infor-
mation) fall short of completeness. To (3), one needs to add that included
in this category of necessity must be all names of modern people and
places, which were, as far as one can see, never subject to any sort of
standardization (e.g. Arklow in Ormonius appears as Arckloa, Arkelus,
Arcklus and in the vernacular form Arckloe and Smerwick as Smerwicca
and Smerwicka). The net result it seems to me of applying Deitz’ principles

12 13
Deitz 1998. Deitz 1998: 156.
 Editing Neo-Latin Literature 403
would be a hippocentaur, a beast that has never actually existed (and would
be extremely ugly and frightening if it did!).
It seems a better option, since full standardization is not possible for
reasons given by Deitz, to leave the orthography of the original text intact
(as far as possible), but to offer the reader in the introductory material a
conspectus of the deviations from standard classical spelling which are to
be found in it. This does not amount to a major dissertation and it has the
advantage that the reader may be better equipped to tackle other original
editions than if most spellings are normalized.14 I would also include here
the accents used by many printers (though never totally consistently): they
are not used in modern editions of classical Latin, yet they form a definite
part of how early modern Latinists thought about distinctions between
words. This having been said, it will not help most readers to keep
abbreviations or ligatures found both in manuscripts and printed editions
(such as the line over a final or medial vowel standing for m) and these
should be written out in full.
Typefaces used in early printed editions (as in modern, also) are some-
times used to differentiate kinds of material or to place emphases. It is not
always easy to see, however, precisely what their function is. In Ormonius,
characteristically the printer italicizes names in the otherwise Roman
typeface of the cognitive apparatus of a text, because they seek to impart
information that might otherwise be missed (i.e. this is the name of a
person or place, even though you may not have seen it before in Latin), or
that they are mere frippery and can be discarded; it is a matter to which the
editor needs to give some thought.

Editorial Principles 4: Apparatuses (A) Criticus (B) Fontium

Critical texts need to be supported by various kinds of apparatus. The one
most familiar to classical philologists, the apparatus criticus, which reports
variant readings, is also appropriate to neo-Latin texts, although in cases where
the witness is a single printed edition, it may be limited to the reporting of
corrections made by the editor, or, as is the case with Ormonius, of corrections
offered by errata slips attached to copies of the earlier edition.
Far more important in most cases will be an apparatus fontium. How-
ever, some discussion of this is necessary, since there are a number of
possibilities about what should be reported: ought it to be limited to giving
the source of citations (which are listed in some original texts in the
14
For an example, see Edwards and Sidwell 2012, list of deviations given 39–40.
404 keith sidwell
margins) or should it seek (especially with poetic texts) to trace and report
the source(s) of phrases (and sometimes individual words, if distinctive
enough)? Much depends, of course, on the sort of text which is being
edited. In the case of a polemical discussion, such as the Tenebriomastix
of Philip O’Sullivan-Beare, or John Lynch’s Alithinologia, the sources of
the author’s scholarly support network and of the propositions he is
attempting to refute are much more important than the language in which
the discussion is couched. Moreover, even in the case of an historical work
in prose (such as Richard Stanihurst’s De rebus in Hibernia gestis), which
consciously and deliberately follows classical stylistic norms, it is rarely the
case that wholesale borrowing can be traced. Where it can, it may be of
interest, but perhaps a note or an entry in the commentary might be the
best place to comment upon it.
Poetic works are on the whole completely different. The poet often
makes a conscious decision to imitate an appropriate classical author and
the linguistic amalgam which ensues is an important index of what the
poet was trying to achieve (or may be). Of course, such decisions (like
choice of genre) do not always and invariably have strictly linguistic
consequences, since early modern materials for close imitation were not
as easily come by as they are today. And ‘imitation’ may be broader than
matters of style: the author of Poema de Hibernia imitated Lucan mainly
not in stylistics so much as in his approach to the material, focusing on the
bizarre and unlovely side of conflict as well as the villainy of the victors. An
attempt at full reportage (such as may be found in the apparatus fontium
for Ormonius) has some drawbacks: it is very long, it takes an inordinate
time to construct and it may, by including common turns of phrase, not be
focusing on the actual sources the poet used (since grammatical manuals
and collections of useful phrases might well have provided this material
rather than close reading or memory). On the other hand, it certainly is the
case that such a procedure does help locate in large measure the linguistic
material available to the writer. This in its turn may allow the reconstruc-
tion in outline of the library the writer possessed or was, at least, available
to him while he was composing. Moreover, it can often turn up inter-
textual allusion of a highly sophisticated type, which depends not only
upon the erudition of the author, but for its full effect upon that of the
work’s proposed audience: a good example in Ormonius is the close
linguistic imitation of a passage from Claudian’s In Rufinum to structure
a criticism of the action of Ireland’s Viceroy against the Earls of Ormond
and Desmond. Partly, then, this decision depends upon the nature of the
text chosen, which may in fact only reveal itself if the editor undertakes a
 Editing Neo-Latin Literature 405
detailed linguistic analysis pari passu with establishing the text: the deci-
sion on which route to take with the apparatus fontium will then follow
from the results of this enquiry.

Editorial Principles 5: Translation, Notes and Commentary

Given that one of the crucial audiences for neo-Latin editions will be
scholars and students of the early modern world, and that many of these
will not have had Latin as a major component of their training, it is crucial
to provide a full translation of the text. The most accessible means of
presenting this will be on the facing page, as for example in the I Tatti
Renaissance Library. The language of the translation will depend to some
extent upon the language-area for which the edition is destined. In any
case, it is best for the editor to use his or her native language for such a
task, in the interests of accuracy and comprehensibility. It is not necessary
to produce a verse tanslation for poetic works, though it has always seemed
to me that the wrong impression can be given to non-Latinate readers if an
effort is not made to cast the text in something akin to the form chosen
and carefully executed by the author (see Ormonius, which is translated
into blank verse, a medium appropriate in the vernacular for the presenta-
tion of epic material in the seventeenth century).
Few neo-Latin texts speak for themselves. The more specifically rooted
in the concerns of their time they are (contemporary arguments about
history, for example, such as Peter Lombard’s Commentarius or the Poema
de Hibernia), the more they require annotation. At the most minimal, this
should involve provision of detailed notes appended to the translation
(footnotes are best for this, since the reader will often need to know
immediately who a specific person is or what event is being referred to).
However, neo-Latin texts are also of interest to the philologist, not least for
their use of vocabulary and their engagement with classical texts. Detailed
work of this kind is best left for a line-by-line commentary (supporting the
apparatus fontium), placed at the end of the text and translation section,
except in those rare instances where it is crucial to the understanding of
the text.
For many texts, perhaps the majority, classical erudition is not enough,
however. The body of material produced by Irishmen during the fif-
teenth to eighteenth centuries, for instance, is deeply rooted in a know-
ledge of (or at least a set of contemporary beliefs about) Irish history –
and quite often of the Gaelic language as well. Thus not only are
historical allusions and debates part of the unseen substructure of these
406 keith sidwell
works, but it can often be the case that Gaelic literary motifs and even
Gaelic words may underlie the Latin text. For example, in Ormonius, the
poet uses Gaelic motifs, intervenes in political debates and translates
Gaelic expressions into Latin: without collaboration with scholars of Irish
place-names, for example, it would not have been possible to locate the
Bungundulus limes referred to at Ormonius 4, 685, nor to understand
without an expert in the Ormond Lordship the choice and disposition of
historical data made by the writer. For such reasons, it seems to me
crucial that editors should undertake their textual work in close collabor-
ation with appropriate early modern experts. Introductory material,
notes to the translation, bibliography and historical commentary are
among the tasks that need to be shared, unless the philologist is also
deeply enough imbued with an understanding of the early modern period
to which the chosen text belongs. The same advice, vice versa, will apply
to an expert in early modern culture who tackles editing a neo-Latin text
but is not trained in classical philology.

Editorial Principles 6: Supporting Material

All users of a neo-Latin text are benefited by the provision of effective and
accurate indices. Philologists will want a conspectus of authors referred to
in the edition (both in the apparatus fontium and the commentary). They
will also require an index of grammatical comments and, if the text is
poetic, an index of references to discussions of metrical issues. They will
also be happy to see a list of notable words. These need not be necessarily
words not found anywhere else: for one thing, the state of neo-Latin
lexicography is not such as to allow absolute certainty in the location of
neologisms. The editor should strive to search all the available classical,
late Latin and medieval lexica, paying special attention to Forcellini
(especially the list of rejected words to be found there) and Du Cange,
and also check Hoven and Ramminger.15 Early modern bilingual diction-
aries are also an indispensable source of information about the meanings
assigned to Latin words in the vernacular languages and sometimes reveal
the currency of terms found nowhere else. For example, Ormonius 4,
72 uses the word Comarchus: this is found in Plautus meaning ‘village
leader’, and in medieval Latin as ‘leader of leaders’, but in the Anglo-
Latin dictionaries of the sixteenth century is glossed ‘Earl’, exactly the
required meaning in the text. At Ormonius 5, 50, the word turrifragus
15
Forcellini 1864–1926; Du Cange 1883–7; Hoven 2006; Ramminger (online).
 Editing Neo-Latin Literature 407
‘tower-smashing’ occurs, which would appear to be a neologism, except
that it is cited in Thomas Thomas’ Dictionarium (though in the meaning
‘gunner’). A system of sigla should be put in place to indicate (1) when a
word is found in a classical Latin dictionary, but has a meaning in the
text not listed there; (2) when a word is only found in a late Latin,
medieval, or neo-Latin lexicon; (3) when it is found only in an early
modern lexicon. Finally, for the general reader, it will be important to
provide a good index of matter and names covering the translation, notes,
introduction and commentary.

Conclusion
Producing a text with all of the various philological and historical tools
listed above may seem a daunting prospect and in truth the work involved
is by no means negligible. This is the reason why the choice of text in
consultation with a network of early modern experts to whom the chosen
text is of interest and importance is crucial. And it is also a strong argument
for preferring collaboration to isolation. Neo-Latin Studies is not merely
not an island, it is a series of interlocked continents in which the construc-
tion of multi-national corporations may prove the most effective way of
ensuring progress in our understanding of the phenomenon. Text-editing
is at the centre of this enterprise, yet editors must not deceive themselves
into thinking their work can be done in a vacuum.

FURTHER READING
For a general introduction to textual criticism, see Maas 1958. The best general
introduction to the editing of neo Latin texts is IJsewijn and Sacré 1998: 434 501.
On orthography, see Deitz 1998. On accents see Steenbakkers 1994b. Further
useful contributions on editing neo Latin texts are: Rabbie 1996, Deneire 2014b
and Van der Poel 2014.
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 Index

Abelard, Peter, Collationes, 289 Ammonio, Andrea, 104

Acevedo, Pedro Pablo de, 230 anagram poetry. See epigrams
Addison, Joseph, 188 Ancient Greek
on epigram, 96 quotation of, 44
Admiranda rerum admirabilium encomia, 346 used to coin new words, 254
Agricola, Rudolph, 288 Andreae, Johann Valentin, Christianopolis, 331
Oratio in laudem philosophiae et reliquarum Andrelini, Publio Fausto, Amores sive Livia, 100
artium, 278–9 Angeriano, Fausto, Amores sive Livia, 100
style compared to Valla, 279 Angeriano, Girolamo
Agrippa, Heinrich Cornelius Erotopaegnion, 100
De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum et Angeriano, Girolamo, Erotopaegnion, 96
artium, atque excellentia verbi Dei Anisio, Giano, Melisaeus, 164
declamatio, 284–5 Annius, 363–5, 376
De occulta philosophia, 281 anti-Ciceronianism, 48–9
Orationes, 281–2 Apuleius, 241, 251, 286, 350
Alberti, Leon Battista, 49, 52, 289, 321, 395 commentary on, by Filippo Beroaldo the
De amore, 313 Elder, 251
De commodis atque incommodis litterarum, 63 Florida, 356
Deifira, 313 Metamorphoses, 316, 319–20
Della famiglia, 289 Metamorphoses and Boccaccio, Decameron,
Ecatonfilea, 313 308
imitation of Roman comedy, 317 Metamorphoses, imitated by Prasch, Psyche
Intercenales, 313–18, 321, 357 Cretica, 336–7
Momus, 321, 334–5, 342, 345 Aratus, 187–8
Musca, 395 Ariosto, Ludovico, 107, 205, 208
Philodoxus, 317 De diversis amoribus, 101
short fiction, 313–18 Aristides, Aelius
Sofrona, 313 Panathenic Oration, 299
Vita S. Potiti, 395 Aristophanes, 158, 345
Alciato, Andrea, Emblemata, 84, 96 Frogs, 343
Aldegati, Marcantonio, Cynthia, 100 ars dictaminis, 131, 255, 258, 272
Aldrovandi, Ulysses, 346, 347–8 Arsilli, Francesco, De poetis urbanis, 108
Alegre, Francisco Xavier art, works of, described in poetry, 106–7
Alexandriad, 219–20 Aulus Hirtius, 144
d’ Alembert, Jean Le Rond Ausonius, 85, 132
Encyclopédie, 70, 80 Avancini, Niccolò, 380
allegory Aventinus, Johannes, Annales, 369–72, 380
in Barclay, Argenis, 327–8 Avranches, Henry of, epic poetry, 203
in Barclay, Euphormio, 325–6
de Almázan, Agustín, translation of Alberti, Bacon, Francis, 3, 48
Momus, 335 Nova Atlantis, 70, 331

474
 Index 475
Balde, Jacob Bidermann, Jakob
Contra abusum tabaci, 157 drama by, 230
Medicinae gloria, 156–7 epigrams, 88
mock encomia, 157 Utopia, 335–6
Solatium podagricorum, 157 Bion, 163
verse satire, 156–8, 162 Biondo, Flavio, 376
Bandello, Matteo, Titi Romani historia, 311 De Roma instaurata, 365
Barbaro, Francesco, 66, 366 De verbis Romanae locutionis, 365
Barberini, Maffeo Historiarum ab inclinatione Romani imperii,
elegies, 111 365
scriptural paraphrases, 108 historiography, 365–8
Barclay, John, 322–3 Italia illustrata, 365–7
Argenis, 41, 327–30 Birck, Sixt or Xystus. See Betuleius, Sixtus
Argenis, translations and continuations of, Bisse, Thomas, 188
329–30 Bissel, Johannes
Euphormio, 323–8, 337 Argonautica Americana, 337–8
Euphormio, translations and continuations of, Icaria, 337
324 Blake, William, and satire, 343
Icon animorum, 324 Blarru, Pierre de, Nanceid, 206
Barlaeus, Caspar, 107 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 32, 85, 176, 298–9, 319–21
von Barth, Caspar, Satirarum liber unus, 152–3 Bucolicum Carmen 5, 173
Bartholin, Thomas, De medicis poetis, 192 Bucolicum Carmen 10, 166
Barzizza, Gasparino, commentary on Cicero, 272 Bucolicum Carmen 14, 164
Basini, Basinio, Hesperis, 205 Decameron, 318, 321, 335
Battle of Frogs and Mice, 346 Decameron, adapted in drama, 229
Baudouin, François, De institutione historiae Decameron, influence upon Alberti,
universae, 361 Intercenales, 314, 316–17
Bauhuis, Bernard, 90 Decameron, influence upon neo-Latin
Bayle, Pierre, Nouvelles de la République des literature, 309
Lettres, 67–8, 76 Decameron, translation into Latin, 308–12
Bebel, Heinrich Bodin, Jean, 289
Facetiae, 310 Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem,
translation of Boccaccio, 310 362
Beccadelli, Antonio, Hermaphroditus, 115 Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, 294, 340, 355
Beckher, Daniel, Medicus microcosmus, 380 Boethius, Hector, 374
Bede, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, 373 Boiardo, Matteo Maria, 205
Bembo, Pietro, 36, 86, 105, 248 Boileau, Nicolas, 150
and Ciceronian style, 244 Bona, Giovanni, Via compendii ad Deum, 380
De Aetna, 293 Bonfini, Antonio, 369
Benci, Francesco Bordini, Giovanni Francesco, 105
Quinque martyres e Societate Iesu in India, 218 Borges, Jorge Luis, The Library of Babel, 356
Somnium, 342 Bourbon, Nicolas, 53, 92
Benningh, Jan Bodecher, Satyricon, 326, 342 Paedagogion, 59–60
Bernegger, Matthias, Systema cosmicum, Boyd, Mark Alexander, imitation of Ovid’s
translation of Galileo, 289 Heroides, 143–4
Bernoulli, Jacob, 78 Boyle, Robert, The Christian Virtuoso, 71
Beroaldo, Filippo [the Elder], 251 Braccesi, Alessandro, 98, 106
translations of Boccaccio, 311 elegies, 103
Berossus, 364 Historia di due amanti, 313
Betuleius, Sixtus, 47 Bracciolini, Jacopo, 311
drama by, 227 translation of Boccaccio, 311
de Bèze, Théodore de Bracciolini, Poggio, 66, 272, 289, 311, 363
epigrams, 88, 93–4 and Ciceronian style, 244
Juvenilia, 64, 84 correspondence with Coluccio Salutati, 298
Bidermann, Herman, Epigrammata, 91 Facetiae or Confabulationes, 309
476 Index
Bracciolini, Poggio (cont.) Epigrammata, 92
reverence for the classics, 298 epigrams, 93–4
Brandolini, Aurelio Lippo, De comparatione Canonieri, Pietro Andrea, Flores illustrium
reipublicae et regni, 291–2 epitaphiorum, 84
Brandon, Charles, 85 Capella, Martianus, theory of rhetoric, 305
Brandon, Henry, 85 Cardano, Gerolamo, Encomium of Nero, 352
Brant, Sebastian, 105 Cardulo, Fulvio, Terentius purgatus, 229
Brecht, Lewin, Euripus, 232 Carsughi, Ranier, 202
Brenkman, Hendrik, 68 Casaubon, Isaac, 73, 79
Bridges, John, translation of the New Testament, commentary on Persius, Satires, 154
prefatory letter to, 145–6 De satyrica graecorum poesi et romanorum
Brinsley, John, 53, 58 satira, 351
Ludus literarius, 57–8 Castellanus, Petrus, Convivium Saturnale, 342
Bruni, Leonardo, 204, 249, 289, 374 da Castiglionchio, Lapo, De commodis curiae
and Ciceronian style, 244 romanae, 292
Dialogi ad Petrum Paulum Histrum, 296–301 Castiglione, Baldassare, 107
Fabula Tancredi, translation of Boccaccio, 310 Alcon, 164–5, 172, 176–7
Historiae Florentini Populi, 358–61 Il cortegiano, 275, 310
Panegyric on the City of Florence, 299 catholicism
Seleuco, 310 relationship to neo-Latin literature, 36–7
views on contemporary poetry, 299 Catullus, 4–6, 11, 64, 91, 95, 97, 121
Bruno, Giordano, 22–7 Carmen 64, 141
Buchanan, George, 53, 62–3, 125, 188 imitation of
Biblical drama, 225 in Goliardic verse, 224
Calendae Maiae, 125 in neo-Latin lyric, 114–20
drama, 228 style, 96
elegies, 58–9, 111 Caussin, Nicolas, drama by, 230
epigrams, 86, 93–6 Celtis, Conrad, 130
Epithalamium, 8 Ad Senectutem Suam, Ode 4.1, 123–4
Icones, 84 lyric poetry, 123–4
lyric, 125 Ceva, Tommaso, 27–30, 32–4
psalm translations, 108, 130 Chaloner, Thomas, De republica Anglorum
Sphaera, 188 instauranda, 192–5
Budé, Guillaume, 77 Champion, François, Stagna, 183
Bugnot, Gabriel Châtillon, Walter of, Alexandreis, 201–4, 211, 219
Archombrotus et Theopompus, 329 Chaucer, Geoffrey
continuation of Barclay, Euphormio, 324 and Boccaccio, 309
Bultelius, Gislenus, 382 The Canterbury Tales, 313
Burmeister, Johannes, 91 Cheke, John, 85
Burton, Robert Chytraeus, David, De lectione historiarum, 361
Anatomy of Melancholy, 340, 354–5 Cicero, 188, 238, 241, 258, 286, 298, 361
Anatomy of Melancholy, and prose satire, 346 dialogues, 290
early commentaries on, 272
Caesar, Julius, 246, 361, 372–3 letters, 132, 269
Calepinus, Ambrosius. See da Calepio, rediscovered in early Renaissance, 132
Ambrogio da as model for epistolary writing, 258–9, 266
Calepio, Ambrogio da, 287 and neo-Latin prose style, 270
Callimachus, 126 Pro Archia, 272
Aetia, 181 and rhetorical theory, 306
Camden, William, 374 Clapham, John, 39
Britannia, 178 classical literature
Camdeni insignia (collection on his death), 179 imitation of in medieval Latin literature, 237,
De connubio Tamae et Isis, 11 244
Campanella, Tommaso, Civitas Solis, 331 imitation of in neo-Latin literature, 238
Campion, Thomas, 4, 6, 86 imitation of, in oratory, 286–7
 Index 477
relationship of neo-Latin literature to, 3–5, Decembrio, Angelo, De politia litteraria, 294–6
10–13, 34 declamation
taught in schools, 56 as educational exercise, 276–7 See also oratory
Claudian, 132, 202 dedicatory letters, 269–70
imitation of, 202 Demetrius, On Style, 259
In Rufinum, imitation of, 404 Denisot, Nicolas, 64–5
and panegyric-epic, 200 Descartes, René, 29, 48, 74
Cnapius, Gregorius, 47 dialogue, 289–306
Codro, Urceo, 154 Ciceronian, 291
Colonna, Francesco, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, convivial or symposiastic dialogue, 291
47 Lucianic, 291
Colucci, Benedetto, Historiola amatoria, 313 medieval tradition, 289–90
Columella, De re rustica, 181 models for, 290–1
commemorative volumes, 85 ‘open’ and ‘closed’ forms, 291–4
Constantinople, fall of, as subject of epic poetry, Platonic, 291
209–12 sixteenth-century theories of, 293
Conti, Antonio, 72 women and, 296
controversiae (school debates), and neo-Latin dictionaries, of neo-Latin, 406–7
literature, 310 didactic poetry, 180–99
Conversini, Giovanni, Latin novellas, 312 and education, 183, 189–92
Corippus, Flavius Cresconius, panegyric epic, 201 Jesuit didactic poetry, 182, 199
Cornarius, Joannes, 88, 91 on astronomical and astrological themes,
Corréa, Tommaso, 87 187–8, 199
Correr, Gregorio, 151 rediscovery of classical texts, 181
De educandis et erudiendis liberis, 182 Diderot, Denis, 70
Senecan drama, 224 Diedo, Francesco, translation of Boccaccio, 311
Cortesi, Paolo Diodati, Charles. See Milton, John, Epitaphium
and Ciceronian style, 245 Damonis
debate on imitation with Angelo Poliziano, Diodorus Siculus, 363
237–8, 244 Diogenes, 155
Historia Hippolyti et Deyanirae, 313 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 361
Corvinus, Laurentius, 382 Distelmayr, Cleophas, 232
Cowley, Abraham, 3, 7 Donne, John, 188
Plantarum libri sex, 181 Ignatius, His Conclave, 345
Crashaw, Richard, 91 Dornau, Caspar
Epigrammata sacra, 90–2 Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Socraticae Joco-
Crespin, Jean, 89 Seriae, 354
Crivelli, Lodrisio, 105 van Dorp, Erasmus Maarten, 226
Cruz, Luís da, 230 Dousa, Janus, 49
Sedecias, 233 drama, 221–34
Cunaeus, Petrus, 350 biblical drama, 223
Encomium of Julian, 352 Christianizing adaptions of Roman comedy,
Sardi Venales, 342 227–9
Curillus, Marius. See Heerkens, Gerard Nicolaas imitation of Seneca in early neo-Latin drama,
Curlo, Giacomo, Bellum civile et Gallicum, 361 224
Jesuit drama, 229–34
d’Amboise, Michel, 96 links with educational settings, 223–6
Dacier, Anne Le Fèvre (Madame Dacier), 72 revival and imitation of Roman drama,
van Dale, Antoni, Dissertationes de origine et 223–6
progressu idololatriae, 381 University of Salzburg neo-Latin drama
Dante (Durante degli Alighieri), 36, 39, 85, 165, project, 395
211, 275, 298–9, 301, 311 vernacular drama, 221–2
Dantyszek, Jan, 137 Draxe, Thomas, 381
Darcio, Giovanni, Canes, 220 Extremi iudicii tuba monitoria, 381
Dati, Leonardo, Senecan drama, 224 Drummond, William, 47
478 Index
Drury, William, Aluredus, 224 dedicatory letters and letters of
Du Bartas, Guillaume de Salluste, 49 recommendation, 271
Du Bellay, Jean, 39, 47, 49, 107, 111 and friendship, 256, 259–61, 267
Tumuli, 98 handbooks of, 257–9
Xenia, 94 letter collections, 258
Dugonics, András, Argonautica, 330 letters of dedication and recommendation,
Dupuy, Jacques, 72 269–70
Dupuy, Pierre, 72 and self-fashioning, 257, 262, 266–9
epitaphs and epitaphic poetry, 84–6
early printed books, using, 379–93 Epulum Parasiticum, 350
editing neo-Latin literature, 394–407 epyllion, 39
digital editions, 381–2, 396 Erasmus, Desiderius, 5, 37, 46, 52, 65, 71, 77, 213,
role of translation, 405 226, 245, 259, 275, 287, 289, 379
elegy, 98–112 Adages, 264
on Christian themes, 108–11 Adagia, 5, 239–40, 268, 400
and encomium, 103–5 Ciceronianus, 245, 248, 253, 307
and mourning, 98 Ciceronianus and eclectic prose style, 239
and patronage, 103–6 Colloquia, 237, 239, 296, 307, 400
elegy, love, 3–4 De conscribendis epistolis, 258–9, 263, 283
adaption of classical Latin love elegy, De conscribendis epistolis and judicial oratory,
100–3 283
Elizabeth I, Latin written in honour of, 55 De duplici copia uerborum ac rerum, 239
Emili, Paolo, 369 De pueris instituendis, 52, 54, 57–8, 285
encomium, paradoxical, 286, 357 dedications in his works, 384
encyclopedias, and prose satire, 345–8 Ecclesiastes, 275–6
Ennius, 140 and eclectic prose style, 238–43
as character in Petrarca, Africa, 204 editions of, 380, 394, 400
epic poetry, 200–20 Encomium matrimonii, 253, 284–6
on battle of Lepanto, 215–16 Epigrams, 94
biblical epic, 220 Epistolae 2192 (to Anton Fugger), 261–4, 266,
classical models for, 202 270
description of warfare in, 207–9 Julius exclusus, 290, 345
encomiastic epic of the fifteenth century, Laus stultitiae, 38, 238–41, 286, 318, 340–1, 343,
204–7 347, 354
on the fall of Constantinople, 209–12 letters, 257, 261–4, 266–7
influence of Walter of Châtillon, Alexandreis, Paraphrasis in Vallae Elegantias (paraphrase of
201–4 Valla, Elegantiae), 239
Italian epic in the sixteenth century, 212–15 prose style, 261–4
Jesuit epic poetry, 217–18, 220 Querela pacis, 238, 241–3, 285
medieval tradition, 200–4 and sacred oratory, 275–6
on the New World, 218–20 and Thomas More, 302–3
epigrams, 83–97 as translator, 302
anagram epigrams, 90 use of exempla, 264
and argutia, 86–7 variety of diction, 253
Christian epigrams, 88, 92 Ertl, Anton Wilhelm, Austriana Regina Arabiae,
epitaphic epigrams. See epitaphs and epitaphic 330
poetry Estienne, Henri
and inscriptions, 83–6 Artis typographicae querimonia, 105
relationship to vernacular poetry, 95–7 Epigrammata Graeca, 89
and wordplay, 89–90 Ethelwold, Bishop of Winchester, Regularis
epistles, prose. See epistolary writing concordia, 222
epistles, verse. See verse epistles Euler, Leonhard, 78
epistolary novel, 321 Eusebius, 362, 364
epistolary writing, 255–71 Even-Zohar, Itamar, 37–42, 51
Cicero as a model for, 258–9 exempla, collections of, 309
 Index 479
Fabricius, Georg, Pransus Paratus, 342 Galvani, Luigi, 78
facetiae, collections of, 310 Garnier, Charles, Henriade, 207
Facetiae Facetiarum, 346 Garzoni, Giovanni, translations of Boccaccio, 311
Facio, Bartolomeo Gassendi, Pierre, 29
De origine belli inter Gallos et Britannos Gastius, Johannes, 91
historia, 310–11 Gellius, Aulus, Attic Nights, 241, 295
translation of Boccaccio, 310 genres, 7
da Feltre, Vittorino, 274 Giberti, Gian Matteo, 138
Ferrarius, Johannes Baptista, Prolusiones, 342 Gilles of Paris, Carolinus, 201
Ficino, Marsilio, 152, 281 Giovio, Paolo
fiction, 308–39 De viris et foeminis, 293
fiction, longer prose, 322–39 Giraldi, Lilio, De poetis nostrorum temporum, 220
and prosimetric form, 339 Gnaphaeus, Wilhelm, Acolastus, 227–8
romantic novels, 327–30, 339 Gott, Samuel, Nova Solyma, 331–2
satirical, 323–7 Götting, Heinrich, 348
satirical novels, 339 Grattius, 181
utopian novels, 330–4, 339 Gray, Thomas, 188
fiction, shorter prose, 308–21 Greek Anthology, 88, 97
figure poems, 89 Greene, Thomas, 18
Filelfo, Francesco, 98, 120, 148 Gretser, Jakob, Jesuit drama, 230
Sphortias, 205 Grimald, Nicholas
Filelfo, Gian Maria, Amyris, 210 Archipropheta sive Johannes Baptista, 228
Filetico, Martino, Iocundissimae disputationes, 296 Gronovius, Johann Friedrich, 72
Firmianus, Petrus. See Lisieux, Zacharie de de Groot, Willem, 44–5
Fisher, Payne, 191 Grotius, Hugo, 48, 104
Flaminio, Marcantonio, hymns, 128–9 Guarini, Battista Guarino, 274
Hymnus in Auroram, 128 Guglielmini, Bernardo, Sermones, 159–60
Fletcher, Giles, 96 Guyet, François, Gaeomemphionis Cantaliensis
Fletcher, Phineas, Eclogues, 167 Satyricon, 325
Florio, Francesco, Historia de amore Camilli et
Emiliae, 313 Hall, Joseph, Mundus alter et idem, 332
Florus, 252 Hallbauer, Collectio praestantissimorum
Fortunatianus opusculorum, 286
theory of rhetoric, 305 van Havre, Jan, Arx virtutis (verse satires), 160
Fortunatus, Venantius, panegyric epic, 200 Hawkins, William, Pestifugium, 174
Fracastoro, Girolamo Heerkens, Gerard Nicolaas, 17, 151
Alcon, 182 Satyrae, 150
Syphilis, 182, 218–20 Heinsius, Daniel, 48–50, 72, 352
Franchini, Francesco, 104 Cras credo, hodie nihil, 349
Fraunce, Abraham, 229 Hercules tuam fidem, 349
des Freux, André, expurgated editions of the Laus Asini, revised as satiric anthology, 349–50
classics, 229 prose satire, 349–50
Frischlin, Nicodemus Virgula divina, 349
drama, 228 Heliodorus, Aethiopica, 328–9
verse satire, 150 Heraclitus, 368
Fronto, 241 Herbert, George, 13
dei Frulovisi, Tito Livio, Humfroidos, 206 letters, 8–10
Fulgentius, 167 Lucus, 90
Mythologiae, 336 Memoriae Matris Sacrum, 9, 13, 86
funerary poetry. See epitaphs and epitaphic Musae Responsoriae, 9
poetry Passio Discerpta, 9, 92
The Temple, 9
Gager, William, 164 Hesiod, 194
drama, 228 Hessus, Helius Eobanus, 61–2, 98, 104
Galilei, Galileo, translated into Latin, 289 Heroides Christianae, 108, 141–3
480 Index
Hessus, Helius Eobanus (cont.) von Hutten, Ulrich, 53, 55–6, 289
Heroides Christianae 1, 141 Nemo, 348
Heroides Christianae 2, 141–3 Hyginus, De astronomia, 188
Heroides Christianae 24, 139–40
Psalterium universum carmine elegiaco imitation
redditum, 108 metaphors of, 19
Heumann, Christoph August, 67, 70 and neo-Latin prose style, 237–8
Historia Brittonum, 362 Isidore of Seville, 368
historiography, 358–76 Isocrates, 347
Hobbes, Thomas, 13 Ister, Aethicus, Cosmographia, 344
Holberg, Ludvig, 326
Iter subterraneum, 2, 332–5 Janicki, Klemens, 53, 60–2, 104
Homer Jerome, 237, 362
as character in Petrarca, Africa, 204 Jesuit literature
early editions of, 204 and Ciceronianism, 250
Iliad, 263 didactic poetry, 182–3, 199
Iliad 2, 215 drama, 228–34, 276
Odyssey, 218 elegies, 109
Hooft, P. C., 49 epic, 217–18, 220
de l’Hôpital, Michel, Epistolarum seu sermonum epigrams, 84, 87–9, 91, 97
libri sex, 136–7 oratory and rhetoric, 250
Horace, 17, 28, 61, 65, 119, 133, 146, 161, 188 satire. See Balde, Jacob
Ars Poetica, 99, 180–1, 186–7, 189, 200, 353 Jesuits, 29–30, 33, 191, 202, 253, 271, 324–6, 335–7
as school text, 56 Johnson, Charles, 89
Epistles, 132, 134, 157, 352 Johnson, Samuel, 97
Epistles, imitation of, 136–8 Johnston, Arthur, 107
Epodes, 118–19 psalm translations, 108
imitation of, in neo-Latin lyric, 120–5 Johnston, John, 107
and Filelfo, 120 Josephus, 219, 364
and Heerkens, 150 Journal des savants, 73, 76, 78
and Neaera, 95 Julian, the Emperor (the Apostate), 350, 352
Odes, 6, 113, 118, 126 prose satire, 342
Odes 1.1, 145 Juvenal, 59, 62, 154, 161, 201, 261
and Petrarch, 113–14 imitation of, 152, 158
and Rastic, 161 Satires 1, 150
Satires, 28, 135, 148, 150, 154, 157–8, 161 imitation of, 150
Satires 1.1, 150 Satires 5, 161
imitation of, 155
Satires 1.3, 5, 240 Karolus Rex et Leo Papa, 201
Satires 2.2, 161 Kepler, Johannes
style, 96 De nive sexangula, 348
Hortensius, Lambertus, Satyrae, 148 Somnium, 335, 348
de Hossche, Sidron Kerckmeister, Johannes, Codrus, 226
Christus patiens, 111 Kinloch, David
Cursus humanae vitae, 110–11 De hominis procreatione, 192
Elegiae 3.1, 110 Kirchmann, Johann, 350
religious elegy, 109–11 Kirchmeyer, Thomas. See Naogeorg
van Hout, Jan, 49 Kitscher, Johannes von, Tragicomoedia de
Huet, Pierre-Daniel, 75 Iherosolomitana profectione, 229
Hugo, Herman, Pia desideria, 84 Koch, Eoban. See Hessus, Helius Eobanus
Hume, David, Aselcanus, 196–8
Hume, James, Pantaleonis vaticinia satyra, 326 Lactantius, 237
Hussovianus, Nicolaus Divinae institutiones, 363
Carmen de statura, feritate ac venatione bisontis, Lanckvelt, Joris van, 227
106 Landino, Cristoforo, 4, 120, 130
 Index 481
Disputationes Camaldulenses, 382–3, 387 Loyola, Ignatius, 229
Xandra, 98, 100, 103–4, 112 Spiritual Exercises, 217, 232
Xandra 1.3, 100–1 translated into Latin, 229
Lando, Ortensio, Forcianae quaestiones, 296 Lübben, Eilert
Landriani, Gerardo, 272 Declamationes satyricae tres, 153–4
Lazzarelli, Lodovico, verse satire, 159–60
De gentilium deorum imaginibus, 107 Lucan, 56
Opusculum de Bombyce, 182 imitation of, 202, 404
Le Febvre, François Antoine, Aurum Carmen and Lucan, Bellum Civile, 202
Terrae-motus Carmen, 183 continuation by May, 205
Leech, John, Idyllia, 167 imitation of, 399
Legge, Thomas, Richardus tertius, 224 Lucian, 316, 318, 321, 335, 340–1, 344, 346–8,
Legrand, Antoine, Sycdromedia, 331 350–1, 354–5
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 3, 74, 76, 374 De historia conscribenda, 361
Leland, John, 85, 374 dialogues, 290–1
De quibusdam nostri saeculi poetis, 108 Dialogues of the Gods, imitation of, 334
Leo, Bernardino, Bellum Turcum, 215–16 imitation of, 343
Lepanto, battle of in the early Renaissance, 357
epic poetry on, 215–16 influence upon More, Utopia, 301–2
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 83 prolalia, 356
letters. See epistolary writing translation into Latin, 301, 400
Libanius, 350 True Story, 335
Lilienthal, Michael, De machiavellismo Lucretius, 17, 21, 28
litterario, 71 and didactic poetry, 183
Lille, Alan of, De planctu Naturae, 344 De rerum natura, 22–30, 181, 215, 353–4
liminary poetry (prefatory or concluding verses), and Bruno, 22–30
45 and neo-Latin didactic poetry, 185–7
Linnaeus, Carl, 78 as epic, 200
Lipsius, Justus, 48, 79, 258–9, 286, 289, 350 influence upon Fracastoro, Syphilis, 219
and anti-Ciceronianism, 250–2, 270 imitation of his style, 251
De constantia, 293–4 rediscovery of, 204
epistolary prose style, 267–9 style, 96
Epistolica institutio, 258–9 and Vida, De arte poetica, 21
Institutio epistolica, 267–8 Ludovico, Ariosto, 111
letter to Erycius Puteanus (1600), 267–9 Luther, Martin, 37
prose style, 254 Lygdamus, 110
Somnium, 341–2, 345, 350 Lynch, John, Alithinologia, 404
de Lisieux, Zacharie, Gyges Gallus, 336 lyric poetry, 113–30
Livy, 203, 241, 261, 328, 358, 361, 374 in Catullan tradition, 114–20
imitation of, 359–60, 373 hymns, 126–9
speeches, imitation of, 374 in imitation of Horace and Pindar, 130
Lloyd, John, Peplus, 86
Llull, Ramon, 289 macaronic poetry, 46–7
Locher, Jakob, Tragoedia de Turcis et Soldano, 229 Macrin, Jean Salmon, 93, 119, 130
Lombard, Peter, Commentarius, 405 Ad Dominum Christum ante somnum, 128–9
Longolius, Christophorus, 237, 245, 248, 253 Catullan lyric, 118
and Ciceronian style, 244 Macrobius, Saturnalia, 291
use of pagan terminology, 253 Macropedius, Georg. See Lanckvelt, Joris van
Loschi, Antonio, 309 Maffei, Giovanni Pietro, 253
Fabula, 310 Magliabechi, Antonio, 69, 77
Inquisitio super undecim orationes Maire, Jean, Elegantiores praestantium virorum
Ciceronis, 272 satyrae, 342, 345, 349–54
Senecan drama, 224 Malvezzi, Paracleto Corneto, Tarentina, 206
Lovati, Antonio, 135–6 Mambrun, Pierre, Constantinus sive idolatria
love elegy. See elegy, love debellata, 216
482 Index
Mancini, Domenico, Quatuor de virtutibus as and self-fashioning, 165
school text, 191 In quintum Novembris, 216
Manetti, Giannozzo, Dialogus in symposio, 310 Of Education, 63
Manilius, 187–8 Paradise Lost, 177
Astronomica, 181, 185 mock encomia, 157
Manovich, Lev, 356 Molza, Francesco Maria, 98, 106
Mantuan, Baptista Spagnuoli, 56, 118, 188 elegies, 108
Adulescentia, 164 Monmouth, Geoffrey of, 373
Eclogue 1, 169 de Montaigne, Michel, 49, 54, 92, 224–5
Eclogue 7, 166 de Montaigu, Hervaeo, Ratio conscribendae
manuscript sources epistolae, 183
locating, 385, 391 Montanus, Petrus
palaeography, 384, 391 verse satire, 151–2
using, 379–87 Moor, Robert, Diarium historicopoeticum, 188
Marchesi, Paolo, translation of Boccaccio, 311 Morata, Olimpia Fulvia, 296
Marcilius, Theodorus, Lusus de Nemine, 348 translations of Boccaccio, 312
Marineus, Lucius, 369 More, Thomas, 5, 13, 48, 289
Martial, 6, 86, 88–9, 91–2, 94–7, 144, 158, 178 Epigrammata, 91, 96
in Goliardic verse, 224 epigrams, 93
expurgated edition, 229 translations of Lucian, 301
Marullo, Michele, 17, 91, 93, 95, 119, 121–4, 128 Utopia, 2, 296, 301–6, 318, 323, 330–1, 340–3,
Hymni naturales, 126–8, 130 347, 354
Hymni naturales 1.6 (Hymn to Bacchus), ductus theory of rhetoric, 305–6
126–8 paratextual elements, 302
and the imitation of Catullus, 118 Morhof, Daniel Georg, Polyhistor, 72
Masen, Jacob, 87 Morisot, Claude Barthélemy
Massieu, Gulielmo, Caffaeum Carmen, 183 continuation of Barclay, Euphormio, 324
Massimi, Pacifico, 4, 105 Peruviana, 330
Hecatelegium, 101–2 Moschus, 163
May, Thomas, continuation of Lucan, Bellum du Moulin, Peter, 7
Civile, 205 Mucanzio, Francesco, translation of Boccaccio,
Melanchthon, Philip, 276, 382 311
and Ciceronian style, 245 Münster, Sebastian, 374
De rhetorica libri tres, 276 Muret, Marc-Antoine, 48, 53, 237, 251, 262, 271
deliberative oratory, 283 and Ciceronian style, 245, 250
Elementa rhetorices, 277 epigrams, 94
and judicial oratory, 283 Epistolae, 264–6
speeches, 277, 280 Epistolae 26, 266–7
Melenchino, Tommaso, translation of Boccaccio, epistolary style, 264–6
310 Juvenilia, 64–5
Melville, Andrew, 196 Pro Francisco II and Ciceronian style, 246–9
Ménage, Gilles, 79 Mussato, Albertino, Ecerinis, 224
Mencke, Johannes Burkhard, De charlataneria
eruditorum, 71 Nagonius, Johannes Michael, encomiastic epic,
Menippean satire. See satire, prose 206
Mercier, Nicolas, 88 de Naldi, Naldo
Milton, John, 13, 50, 53, 64, 111, 179, 188, 208 elegies, 98, 103
Ad patrem, 61, 64 Volaterrais, 210
and Italy, 165–6 Nanni, Giovanni. See Annius
compared to Homer, 64 Nannius, Petrus
compared to Virgil, 64 Somnia, 342, 354
elegies, 99 Naogeorg, Thomas
Epistolae familiares 7, 166 Satyrarum libri quinque, 148–50
Epistolae familiares 10.30, 167 verse satire, 155, 160, 162
Epitaphium Damonis, 163–5, 168–79 critique of contemporary poets in, 152
 Index 483
Nemesianus, 181 as school text, 56–7, 62
Neo-Latin literature style, 96
cultural significance, 2 Tristia 4.10, imitations of, 139–40
definition, 1 verse letters, 132
and education, 3, 56–7 Ovid (ascribed to), Halieutica, 181
educational significance, 2 Owen, John, 88–90, 92–3
as juvenilia, 64–5
de’ Nerli, Neri, 309 Palingenio, Marcello
Nessel, Martin, 50 Zodiacus vitae, 28, 188, 191
Newton, Isaac, 382 Pandolfini, Francesco, translation of Boccaccio, 312
Nifo, Agostino, De re aulica, 310 Pandoni, Gianantonio de Porcellio
Nizzolius, Marius, and Ciceronian style, 245 Feltria, 206–7
Nobili, Roberto, translation of Boccaccio, 311 Pannonius, Janus, 107
Nogarola, Isotta, 296 Pansa, Paolo, 98
Nolle, Heinrich, Parergi philosophici speculum, 336 papacy
Nomi, Federigo and panegyric, 105
Liber satyrarum, 158–9 Papeus, Petrus, Comoedia de Samaritano
verse satire, 150, 161–2 evangelico, 228
novella. See fiction, shorter prose da Parma, Basinio, Astronomicon libri II, 182
novels. See fiction, longer prose Pascoli, Giovanni, 13
Nugae Venales, 346 Passerini, Luigi
Historia lepida de quibusdam ebriis
occasional literature, 7–10 mercatoribus, 313
Ocland, Christopher, Praelia Anglorum, 191 pastoral poetry, 10–13, 163–79
Oldenburg, Henry, 69 pastoral elegy, 163–5
O’Meara, Dermot Paulinus Nolanus, 132
Ormonius, 216, 400–7 de Peiresc, Nicolas-Claude Fabri, 69
Opicius, Johannes, 104 Persius, 150, 152, 154, 156
Opitz, Martin, 39, 49–50 Petit, Guillaume, 77
oratory, 272–88 Petit, Jean, edition of Virgil, 389
and classical imitation, 286–7 Petit, Jehan, 77
deliberative oratory, 283–4 Petit, Nicolas, 53, 56
and freedom of speech, 284 Petrarca, Francesco, 3, 32, 36, 50, 106, 132, 165,
Renaissance uses of, 273–4, 283–4 200, 258, 298–300, 379, 383
style and technique, 286–8 Africa, 169, 201, 203–5, 220, 383
Origo gentis Romanae, 363 and classical imitation, 237
O’Sullivan-Beare, Philip Bucolicum Carmen, 165, 167–70, 179
Historiae Catholicae Iberniae Compendium, 395 Bucolicum Carmen 9, 174
Tenebriomastix, 404 Bucolicum Carmen 10, 173–7
Zoilomastix, 395, 400 Bucolicum Carmen 11, 174
Oudin, François Canzoniere, 95
Poemata didascalica, 7, 181, 183 Collatio Laureationis and early humanist
Ovid, 6, 17, 98–9, 110, 134, 319 oratory, 272
Amores, 137 Eclogue 2, 164
didactic poetry, 181 editions of, 380
Ex Ponto, 177 Epistolae Familiares 10.4, 167
Ex ponto 4.16, 177 Epistolae Familiares 16.2, 175
exile poetry, 135, 137–9 Griselda, translation of Boccaccio, 308–10
Fasti, 90, 181, 188, 363 influence upon neo-Latin love elegy, 102–3
and Goliardic verse, 224 Memorandarum rerum libri, 309
Heroides, 132, 141–4, 146 pastoral poetry, 166
influence upon Piccolomini, 319, 321 Rerum familiarum, 132
imitation of, 17, 202 Rerum familiarium 13.8, 259–61
Metamorphoses, 21, 181, 208, 320 Rerum familiarium 24.10 (verse letter to
as epic, 200 Horace), 113–14
484 Index
Petrarca, Francesco (cont.) Rusticus, 194–6
Rerum familiarium libri, 256–7 Silvae, 177, 191
Secretum, 294, 303, 383 Polybius, 358
verse epistles, 144 Polydore Vergil, 369, 376
Petronius, 323, 326, 352 Anglica historia, 372–4
Cena Trimalchionis, 356 poly-system theory, 37–42
satiric style, 323 Pontano, Giovanni Gioviano, 5, 91, 93–4, 108,
Satyrica, 328 111, 120, 130, 250
Philip, Ambrose, on verse epistles, 133 Actius, 361
Philomusus. See Locher De amore conjugali, 12
Philp, James, Grameid, 216 De amore conjugali 1.1, 102
picaresque novel, 335 De bello Neapolitano, 361
Piccolomini, Enea Silvio Bartolomeo, 52, 309 De laudibus divinis, 109
Chrysis, 225 De sermone, 310
Cinthia, 100 and didactic poetry, 182
Commentarii, 401 Eclogue 1, 10–13
De duobus amantibus historia, 318–21 Hendecasyllabi sive Baiae, 115
De liberorum educatione, 54 Hesperides, 220
Historia Austrialis, 368–9 and the imitation of Catullus, 118
letters, 395 Melisaeus, 164
Pietro Carmeliano, Pietro, 104 Naeniae, 13
Pindar, 120, 126 Parthenopeus, 120
Pisano, Ugolino Parthenopeus 1.5, 116–17
Philogenia et Epiphenus, 225 Parthenopeus 1.28, 115–16
Pius, Ioannes Baptista Pius Pruritus, 115
and anti-Ciceronian style, 251 Tumuli, 86, 98
Plante, Franciscus Urania, 188
Mauritias, 217 Pontanus, Jacobus, Progymnasmata Latinitatis,
Platina, Bartolomeo, 274 250
Plato, 341, 345, 368, 382 Pope, Alexander, 150
dialogues, 290 Prasch, Johann Ludwig, Psyche Cretica, 336–7
Symposium, 281 Prasch, Susanna, 337
Plautus, 224–7, 250 printed books, locating early modern Latin,
expurgated edition, 229 385–7
and Lipsius, 252 printing (as a theme in poetry), 105
Pseudolus, 317 prolalia
Pléiade, 48–9 definition, 356
Pliny the Elder, 364 and prose satire, 352–6
Natural History, 241, 246 pronunciation of Latin, 79, 274–5
Pliny the Younger, 87, 361 Propertius, 4, 6, 98, 100, 104, 106, 110
letters, 269 prose style. See style, prose
Plutarch, 155, 304 Prudentius, 6
dialogues, 290 psalms, verse translations of, 108
Poema de Hibernia, 399, 402, 404–5 pseudo-Libanius, 264
Polenton, Sicco, Argumenta super aliquot Ptolemy, 370
orationibus et invectivis Ciceronis, 272 Pusculo, Ubertino, Constantinopoleo 4, 209
Polignac, Melchior de, Anti-Lucretius, 28 Puteanus, Erycius, 267, 353
Poliziano, Angelo, 93, 103, 111, 123, 130, 259, 385 Comus, 342
and classical imitation, 243 as prosimetric text, 344
debate over imitation with Paolo Cortesi, letter from Justus Lipsius, 267
237–8, 244 Puttenham, George, 85
Elegiae, 98
Miscellanea 1.6, 117 Quarles, Francis, 84
Nutricia, 123, 176 Quattuor Clarissimorum Virorum Satyrae, 350
Ode 6, 122–3 Quevedo, Francisco de, 48
 Index 485
Quillet, Claude, Callipaedia, 183–5 Sangenesius, Joannes, De Parnaso et finitimis locis,
Quintilian, 97, 238, 244, 273, 361 342
Institutio oratoria, 272 Sannazaro, Iacopo, 93, 95, 111, 119, 179
quotation in literary texts, 43–5 Arcadia, 174
compared to Virgil, 86
Rabelais, François, Gargantua and Pantagruel, De partu Virginis, 213–14, 220
355 Elegiae 2.10, 106
Rambaldi, Benvenuto, interpretation of Petrarca, epigrams, 86, 88, 94
Bucolicum Carmen, 167 and the imitation of Catullus, 118
Ranzio, Mercurio, De falso hypocrito, 225 Piscatory Eclogues, 166
Rapin, René, Horti, 220 Piscatory Eclogues 4, 173
Rastic, Džono, verse satire, 161–2 Sapidus, Joannes, Anabion sive Lazarus redivivus,
recommendation, letters of, 269–70 228
republic of letters, 66–80 Sarbiewski, Maciej Kasimierz
as a Christian republic, 68 epigrams, 88
definition of, 66–9 satire, prose, 340–57
and humanitas, 75 anthologies of, 342–3
moralising element of, 71–2 and encyclopedism, 345–8
role of conversation within, 77 Lucianic and Senecan traditions within, 341–2
role of correspondence within, 76–7 in medieval period, 343–4
Restius, Junius. See Rastic, Džono modern versions, 344
Reuchlin, Johann, 55 prosimetric texts, 344–5
Reusner, Nicolas, 90 satire, verse. See verse satire
Rhenanus, Beatus, 369, 373–4 satiric poetry. See verse satire
Res Germanicae, 368 Sautel, Pierre-Juste
Richelet, César Pierre, 67, 69 Annus sacer poeticus, 91
Rigault, Nicolas Divae Magdalenae ignes, 92
Funus Parasiticum, 350 Scaliger, Joseph Justus, 349
Rococciolo, Francesco, Mutineis, 207, 381 Fabulae Burdoniae Confutatio, 349
Rojas, Francisco de, Celestina, 225 Scaliger, Julius Caesar, 83, 87, 189
Roman comedy. See Plautus; Terence and Ciceronian style, 245
influence upon Alberti, Intercenales, on elegy, 99
317, 319 on epigrams, 86–7
Ronsard, Pierre, 49, 63–4 Urbes, 107
imitation of Secundus, 120 Schoen, Cornelius, Terentius christianus, 228
Rossi, Gian Vittorio, Eudemia, 332 scholasticism, 287
de Roulers, Adriaen, Stuarta tragoedia, 224 Scholirius, Petrus
Royal Society, The, 73 Sermonum familiarium libri tres, 155
Royen, Adrianus van (Patricio Trante), verse satire, 161
De conubiis florum, 183 Schöpper, Jacob [the Elder], Johannes decollatus,
Roze, Jean, Carmen aviarium, 183 227
Rufus, Curtius, Vita Alexandri, 202 Schotten, Hermann, 229
Ruggle, George, 47 drama, 229
Rutgersius, Jan, 349 Scioppius, Gaspar, 349, 352
Sectanus, Quintus
Sabinus, Angelus verse satire, 162
replies to Ovid’s Heroides, 143 Secundus, Joannes, 4, 94, 111
Sabinus, Georgius, 107 Basia, 113, 118–20, 130
Sacchetti, Franco, Trecentonovelle, 309 Basium 16, 119
Sallust, 241, 358, 369, 371, 374 Elegiae 3.7, 99–100
Salutati, Coluccio, 132, 297–8 elegies, 102, 107
correspondence with Poggio Bracciolini, 298 epigrams, 91
Declamatio Lucretie, 310 Epistolarum libri duo (verse epistles), 137–8
verse epistle, 134 Secundus, Petrus Lotichius
Sambucus, Johannes Pannonicus, Emblemata, 84 epicedia, 98
486 Index
Seneca, 261, 319 Stockwood, John, Progymnasmata scholasticum,
Apocolocyntosis, 323, 340–2, 344–5, 348, 352, 354 89
De beneficiis, 158 Strabo, 370
drama, 224 Strada, Famiano, 250
on imitation, 243 Momus, 342
imitation of in early neo-Latin drama, 224 as prosimetric text, 344
influence upon verse satire, 154–5 Stradling, John, 93
letters, 132, 269 epigrams, 93
and Lipsius, 252 Strozzi, Tito Vespasiano, 107
Ludus de morte Claudii. See Seneca, Eroticon libri, 100
Apocolocyntosis Sturm, Jean
Phaedra, 319 and Ciceronian style, 245
as prose model, 259 Phormio, 226
Sepulveda, Ioannes Ginesius Roman drama and education, 226
De orbe novo, 254 style, prose, 237–54
Sergardi, Lodovico. See Sectanus, Quintus anti-Ciceronianism, 250–2, 254
Seymour sisters (Anne, Jane and Margaret), Ciceronian style, 243–50, 254
Hecatodistichon, 85 and Jesuit education, 250
Seymour, Anne. See Seymour sisters eclectic style, 238–43
Seymour, Jane. See Seymour sisters and historiography, 252
Seymour, Margaret. See Seymour sisters and rhythm, 249–50, 254
Shakespeare, William, 3, 17, 39, 188, 221, 374 use of pagan and Christian terms, 253
The Taming of the Shrew, 227 vocabulary, 254
Siber, Adam, 91 Suetonius, 241, 373
Enchiridion pietatis puerilis, 92 Swedenborg, Emmanuel, 395
Sidney, Philip, 57, 85, 228 Swift, Jonathan, 343, 354
Sidonius Apollinaris, 251 Gulliver’s Travels, 334, 341
Sigea, Luisa, 296 Symonds, John Addington, 205
Sigonio, Carlo, 36, 293 Synesius, Praise of Baldness, 342
theory of dialogue, 293
Silius Italicus, Punica, 204, 206 Tacitus, 244, 281, 361, 364–5, 370, 372–4
silvae, 6 Germania, 371
Silvestris, Bernardus, De cosmographia, 167, 344 and Lipsius, 252
Soter, Joannes, 88, 91 Tardif, Guillaume, 309
Souciet, Etienne Auguste, Cometae Carmen, 183 Tarillon, François, Pulvis Pyrius Carmen, 183
Spenser, Edmund, 208 Tasso, Torquato, theory of dialogue, 293
Speroni, Sperone Tedaldi, Francesco, 312
theory of dialogue, 303 Teive, Diogo de, historical drama, 224
Sperulo, Francesco, 209 Terence, 224–6, 317, 319
elegies, 102 Adelphoe, 317
epic poetry, 208 as school text, 56
Spitzer, Leo, 17–18 Tesauro, Emanuele, 97
Sprat, Thomas, 73 Cannocchiale, 88
Stanihurst, Richard, De rebus in Hibernia, 404 Theocritus, 163, 179
Statius, 144, 201–2 Thomas, Thomas, Dictionarium, 407
Silvae, 6 Thucydides, 358
Thebaid, 202 Tibullus, 6, 64, 98, 110
Stay, Benedict, 24 Tifernate, Lilio, 400
Stefonio, Bernardino, 230 translation into Latin, 48–9, 78, 80, 85, 308–12
Stella, Giulio Cesare, Columbeid, 218 Trante, Patricio. 183 See Royen, Adrianus van
Stephanus, Henricus. See Estienne, Henri Trebizond, George of
Sterne, Laurence, Tristram Shandy, 355 theory of rhetoric, 305
Stevin, Simon, 40 Trissino, Gian Giorgio, Sofonisba, 224
Stiblinus, Caspar, De republica Eudaemonensium, Turmair, Johann Georg. See Aventinus,
331 Johannes
 Index 487
Valentin, Jean-Marie, Répertoire of Jesuit drama, Scacchia ludus, 20
231–2 verse epistles, 138–9
Valerius Maximus, 261 Vigneul-Marville, Bonaventure d’Argonne,
Valla, Lorenzo, 289 69, 73
academic inaugural speech from 1455, 279–80 Villa Dei, Alexander of, Doctrinale, 287
De falso credita et ementita Constantini de Villerías y Roelas, José Antonio, Guadalupe, 219
donatione, 279 Viperano, Giovanni Antonio, Filius prodigus, 227
Elegantiae, 243, 287 Virgil, 17, 140, 188, 201, 218, 260, 298, 319–20,
and eclectic sytyle, 238 337, 382
paraphrased by Erasmus, 239 Aeneid, 56, 138, 200, 215, 218, 363
Varro, Menippean Satires, 241, 323, 341–2, 351–2 continuation of, 387–93
Vaughan, William, De sphaerarum ordine, 188 and epic tradition, 200
Vega, Lope de, 221 as school text, 181
Vegetius, 209 Aeneid 4, 91
Vegio, Maffeo Aeneid 6, 198, 353
Book 13 of the Aeneid, 205, 387–93 Aeneid 9, 90
Velius, Caspar Ursinus, Poematum libri quinque, and didactic poetry, 183
134–5 Eclogues, 11–12, 163, 214–15
Venegas, Miguel, 230, 232–3 landscape of, 173
Verardus, Carolus, Historia Baetica, 229 and neo-Latin pastoral poetry, 163–79
Verardus, Marcellinus, 229 wandering in, 166
Fernandus servatus, 229 Eclogues 1, 172, 179
Vergerio, Pier Paolo [the Elder], 52 and Petrarca, Bucolica Carmen, 167–8
De ingenuis moribus, 57 Eclogues 4, 141, 164
Paulus, 225, See also Bruni, Dialogi ad Petrum Eclogues 5, 163–4, 176
Paulum Histrum Eclogues 6, 166
Verino, Michele, 53, 60 Eclogues 7, 353
Verino, Ugolino, 53, 60, 98, 107 Eclogues 9, 176
Carlias, 212 Eclogues 10, 169, 178
elegies, 103 Georgics, 181
Flametta, 100, 103 and neo-Latin didactic poetry, 182–5,
vernacular literature 189–92, 199
relationship to neo-Latin literature, 3–5, 13, Georgics 3, 190–8
35–51, 95–7, 405–6 Georgics 4, 193
Verne, Jules, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, 334 imitation of, 202, 220
verse epistles, 131–47 by Vida, 20, 30–2
prefatory epistles, 144–6 and Neaera, 95
verse letters. See verse epistles as school text, 56–7, 62–3
verse satire, 148–62 style, 96
classical satirists, 148, 150 Virgil (ascribed to), Aetna, 181
influence of Seneca upon, 154–5 Vita Sancti Deodati Valcandi Mediani, 170–2
and literary critique, 151–4 Vitalis, Janus, Elogia, 107
medical satire, 156–9, 162 Vitruvius, 209
moralising force of, 148–51 Vives, Juan Luis, 258
and philosophy, 154–6 Colloquia, 237
Vespasiano, Tito, Borsias, 205 De conscribendis epistolis, 258–9
Victoria, Pedro Gobeo de, Naufragio y De consultatione and deliberative oratory, 283–4
peregrinación, 337 on oratory, 276
Vida, Marco Girolamo Somnium et Vigilia, 354
Bombyces, 20 Voltaire, 67
Christiad, 30–1, 212–15, 220 van den Vondel, Joost, 36, 45, 48
Christiad 2, 208–9 Vossius, Gerardus Joannes, 72
De arte poetica, 18–21, 32, 189–92, 197–8
and the imitation of Virgil, 20 Ward, Arnold Sandwith, 21–2
Opusculum de bombyce, 183 Ware, James, De scriptoribus Hiberniae, 394
488 Index
Watson, Thomas, 164 translation of Piccolomini, De duobus
Amyntae Querula, 169 amantibus historia, 318
Antigone, prefatory letter to, 144–5
Hekatompathia, 95, 103 Xenophon
Meliboeus, 165 (Ps.) De aequivocis, 364
Weston, Elizabeth Jane, 93 dialogues, 290
Willes, Richard, 89 Symposium, 291
William the Breton, Philippeis, 201
Wilson, Thomas, 85 Zanchi, Basilio
Wimpheling, Jakob, Stylpho, 226 Damon, 164
Wyatt, Thomas, 85 Zovitius, Jakob, Ovis perdita, 228
von Wyle, Niklas, 310 Zuppardo, Matteo, Alfonseis, 210–11