An Anthology of Neo-Latin Poetry by Classical Scholars

Abstract

Presenting a range of Neo-Latin poems written by distinguished classical scholars across Europe from c. 1490 to c. 1900, this anthology includes a selection of celebrated names in the history of scholarship. Individual chapters present the Neo-Latin poems alongside new English translations (usually the first) and accompanying introductions and commentaries that annotate these verses for a modern readership, and contextualise them within the careers of their authors and the history of classical scholarship in the Renaissance and early modern period. An appealing feature of Renaissance and early modern Latinity is the composition of fine Neo-Latin poetry by major classical scholars, and the interface between this creative work and their scholarly research. In some cases, the two are actually combined in the same work. In others, the creative composition and scholarship accompany each other along parallel tracks, when scholars are moved to write their own verse in the style of the subjects of their academic endeavours. In still further cases, early modern scholars produced fine Latin verse as a result of the act of translation, as they attempted to render ancient Greek poetry in a fitting poetic form for their contemporary readers of Latin. The interdependence and interaction of classical scholarship and poetry is known since the time of the classical world itself. This multi-author volume offers a series of Neo-Latin poems from all over Europe which are either by classical scholars themselves or closely connected with classical scholarly publication; it provides the original text, an English translation and detailed commentary for each piece included, in order to present this fascinating material for a modern audience. The volume is introduced by a contextualising introduction. The texts range in date from the end of the fifteenth century to the end of the nineteenth, and are richly diverse in character: for the earlier period there are studies of the liminary poems for Nicolo Perotti’s 1489 Cornu copiae, the supplementary elegiacs supplied by Paolo Marsi for his 1482 edition of Ovid’s Fasti, the early verse of the great printer Aldus Manutius (c.) 1450–1515) and the great scholar Piero Vettori (1499–1585), all Italians, and the poems of the Spanish grammarian Antonio de Nebrija (1444–1522) and the French Greek scholar Jean Dorat (1508–1588). After 1600, we have studies of the Latin poems of the Franco-Scottish scholar and novelist John Barclay (1582–1621), the learned Dutchman Janus Dousa (1545–1604), the liminary poems for Birgitte Thott’s 1658 Seneca translation into Danish, Martial-inspired epigrams by the Cambridge don James Duport (1606–1678), and occasional poems by the Göttingen professor Johann Matthias Gesner (1691–1761). Most recent is the Latin poetry of the Italian poet and academic Giovanni Pascoli (1855–1912).