Victoria Moul. A Literary History of Latin and English Poetry: Bilingual Verse Culture in Early Modern England

Abstract

The Latin poetry of early modern English writers has typically been the preserve of classical reception studies; scholars of English literature have tended to regard it as tangential, inferior, or merely derivative. Moul’s groundbreaking study insists upon the inseparability of early modern English and Latin poetry and the impossibility of reading one without the other. Drawing extensively on her own recent investigations of early modern Latin manuscript holdings in English collections—the first such survey in modern times—as well as on early printed texts, she argues forcefully for the bilingualism of early modern English verse culture, demonstrating the constant counterpoint between the respective strands of Latin and vernacular poetry. For English literary scholars, the book’s most striking achievement is to demonstrate, as Moul puts it, ‘how English verse culture as a whole looks, feels, sounds and makes sense differently if we stop pretending that all that Latin is not there’ (p. 2). She shows not only the extent to which early modern readers and writers were steeped in classical literature but also how the classical canon as taught in humanist grammar schools differed from that of the modern curriculum and the generic, lexical, and thematic implications of that difference. In a valuable correction to a conventional view of Renaissance writers as determinedly ‘classicizing’, she demonstrates the importance of medieval and later Latin literature, as well as the biblical and vernacular traditions. By showing how the neo-Latin tradition feeds into the vernacular, and by setting vernacular poetry in its contemporary neo-Latin context, she is able to provide some new and arresting readings of familiar texts. Both Latinists and English scholars will welcome the array of virtually unknown authors who appear at every turn, offering tantalizing prospects for further study.