Anglo-Latin macaronic verse in early modern England: A new survey of manuscript evidence

Abstract

Latin-vernacular macaronic verse is a distinctive feature of early modern literary culture across Europe. Scholarship has, however, focused upon Italian examples; the production of such verse in England has been particularly little studied, with existing analyses of Anglo-Latin macaronic based on a very small corpus of printed poems from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries only. This survey of previously unconsidered manuscript evidence demonstrates the production of Anglo-Latin macaronic verse of many kinds in early modern England, at least from the 1550s onwards, including new examples of both ‘morphological’ macaronic verse (in which a Latin poem contains some English words inflected as if they were Latin) and ‘simple’ macaronic (comprising various other kinds of language mixture). The article includes new evidence for the knowledge of Italian macaronic poetry in sixteenth-century England; for evolving trends in the typical uses of Anglo-Latin macaronic—from ad hominem satire in the earliest periods to more generally humourous or topical verse in the seventeenth century; on the use of rhyme and borrowings from other languages (including Greek, French and Italian) in Anglo-Latin macaronic; and for the importance of manuscript sources especially for assessing the prevalence of relatively ‘popular’ and informal types of bilingual literature, such as macaronic verse.