Latin Poems Research Articles

An Unidentified Latin Poem by William Alabaster and its Translation by Abraham Cowley

An Unidentified Latin Poem by William Alabaster and its Translation by Abraham Cowley

Milton, Lucretius, and the “Womb of Nature”

ABSTRACT Milton’s relation to Lucretius has been ignored, interpreted as hostile, or reduced to a few spectacular moments in the epic descriptions of Chaos and Creation. This article shows, contrarily, that Milton’s engagement with this Roman poet-materialist was intimate, systematic, and lifelong. To this end, it brings together the well-known Lucretian moments in Paradise Lost, a host of hitherto-unrecognized echoes in that epic, De Doctrina Christiana, the divorce tracts, Milton’s Latin poems, and some of his little-studied marginalia. Starting with Naturam non pati senium, it establishes Milton’s habit of extensive citation and strategic redeployment of Lucretius even when arguing against him. Milton rightly embraced Lucretius, not as a frigid atomist but as a pansexual vitalist. The ancient poet’s primordial particles are living seeds, wombs, and genitalia rather than mechanically colliding atoms, and Milton’s citations cluster around this theme. Subsequent sections explore the two authors’ shared imagery of procreation, nutrition, growth, elimination, emotion, cognition, and—in conclusion—poetic creativity.

Slovenska baročna pridiga

The article discusses the Baroque sermon as a special literary genre that belongs to so-called nonfiction literature. It is limited to the three main authors who managed to publish their texts in printed form at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century. These are the Capuchin preachers Janez Svetokriški and Rogerij Ljubljanski, and the Jesuit Jernej Basar. Of these, the most important is certainly Svetokriški. Slovenian literary history has recognised the literary qualities in his Sveti priročnik, especially where it uses distinctly narrative elements (exempla, fables, short humorous texts). In content and style, the sermons of Roger of Ljubljana (Palmarium Empyreum) are similar, except that they contain less humour and fewer references to the contemporary social context. Among Roger’s literary virtues is a sense of poetic language, as evidenced by his translations of Latin poems embedded in his sermons. The work of Jernej Basar (Conciones) represents a new type of ascetic-meditative sermon in the Slovenian language. This work, too, contains some typically Baroque elements, such as the theme of vanitas mundi, although in part it already approaches the classicist type of sermon, perhaps influenced by Paolo Segneri.

Why is Milton ‘Milto’? Giovanni Salzilli, John Milton, and Aelian

In 1638 the Italian scholar Giovanni Salzilli sent the young John Milton who had recently arrived in Italy a short Latin poem in which Salzilli addressed Milton as ‘Milto.’ He did not use the more commonly found form of Milton’s Latin name, Miltonus and Miltonius. Using archival and print materials as evidence this paper examines this apparent hapax legomenon and suggests that its source can be found in Aelian’s Varia Historia.

Critical Notes on Pseudo-Sisbert’s Exhortatio Poenitendi

This paper discusses textual problems in an anonymous Late Latin poem entitled Exhortatio poenitendi. In his classic edition (Berlin 1914), Karl Strecker used nine witnesses. In my critical edition from 2021, I studied, collated, and classified twenty manuscripts of this poem and established a new stemma codicum; a manuscript not known to me at the time has been used in this paper. In this article I propose new conjectures absent from my edition, reject other proposals made by previous editors, and discuss lines in which either the stemma cannot be used to guide the editor in the choice of readings, the diffusion of variants is irregular, or I have made a choice different from that of previous editors. Many of the disputed passages can now be clarified in the light of two other works attributed to the same anonymous author (the Lamentum poenitentiae and the Oratio pro correptione uitae), which were published together with the Exhortatio poenitendi for the first time in my 2021 edition.

What Was Stefan Yavorsky Silent about? Undelivered Sermons as a Multiple Equation

This article examines the circumstances behind Metropolitan Stefan Yavorsky of Ryazan and Murom’s not delivering a sermon about the truth persecuted everywhere on the Day of St John Chrysostom on November 13, 1708. The text is marked as non dictum in the manuscript by the author. In historiography, Yavorsky’s undelivered sermons are often used to characterise the critical mood of the preacher in the context of the protracted Northern War and the author’s intentions, as he allegedly changed his mind in time to deliver an accusatory sermon. The author of the article suggests that the chief factor that prevented Yavorsky from preaching on the day of St John Chrysostom was the anathematisation of Hetman Ivan Mazepa (in 1708), which preceded the event, and the death of Dimitri Rostovsky, a close friend of the Metropolitan's (in 1709). The article provides arguments confirming the author’s intentions to voice the ideas of this sermon, such as the usage of its fragments in other texts. For the first time, the sermon for the Day of St John Chrysostom is presented in the context of Yavorsky’s preaching heritage, and its content is analysed considering the author’s complex intention (the article also contains rare Yavorsky’s poems in Latin and translations thereof). The research emphasises the need to publish the full text of Stefan Yavorsky’s sermons and further study their place in the public sphere and intellectual culture of the Petrine era.

“Our very prison this earth is”: the world as prison and other images common to More's Epigrams and later works

More's Epigrams of 1518, usually associated with More's humanist phase, contain a number of poems designed as meditations on proper attitudes towards the goods of fortune. Special attention is given to how phrasing and argumentation used in the Epigrams reappears within a number of More's later works, including Last Things, Treatise on the Passion, and A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation. Both briefer and longer examples are discussed, the latter including More's more elaborate description of the world as prison (Epigram 119) and fame as an insubstantial wind (Epigram 132). Numerous parallels between the arguments of these epigrams and his later works, written for “spirituall profytt” ( The Correspondence of Sir Thomas More, ed. Elizabeth Frances Rogers [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947], 531), are examined, giving us insights into the writings of the humanist More. As much of his earlier English poetry, some of the More's Latin poems were written with an eye towards “the happy continuannce and graciouse encreace of vertue” ( CW 1:51/20–21)

Creative Translation and Classical Reception: The English Pervigilium Veneris

This discussion addresses selected English versions of the late Latin poem the Pervigilium Veneris from the seventeenth century to the twentieth. Most translations, these versions show, construct the poem in accordance with their own era's tastes and assumptions, but this predictable outcome is not the only one possible. Creative translations are different: they seem to show not (or not only) how the work was once seen, but what it still is, or can be. Thus translations are able, in special cases, to do much more than provide evidence about how a cultural artifact of the past has been constructed over time – the usual starting point in reception study. In this instance the early translations by Thomas Stanley (1647) and Thomas Parnell (1722), rather than any of those which have proliferated since the nineteenth century, belong in this special category.

Der Pfaffe Amis und das IV. Laterankonzil

Abstract This article establishes a connection between the decisions of the Fourth Lateran Council and Der Pfaffe Amis, a work by the Knitter. Doing so results in totally new perspectives on the work, which is therefore connected to anticlerical literature. Der Pfaffe Amis is not just a comedy, as researchers thought, but it stands in continuity with Latin poems like, e.g., the Hierapigra ad purgandos praelatos by Aegidius of Corbeil or the work Speculum prelatorum by an unknown author. The single episodes have a class-based structure in their composition, in which the last two mercurial episodes abandon the legal purview of the church, besides being highly criminal under the laws at the time, but because of the Council’s decisions, they would still lead to the eternal salvation of the priest’s soul.

Kwestia tajemniczego autorstwa renesansowego poematu Sarca

Dating to the 1530s, the Latin poem Sarca was published in 1842 in Rome by Angelo Mai based on a manuscript found in Vienna. Forty years after publication, the incompatibility of this edition with the Viennese manuscript was first noticed. In the second half of the last century, a polemic began challenging the theory, previously considered certain, that Sarca’s author was Pietro Bembo. Researchers named Girolamo Fracastor, Andrea Navager and Agostino Beazzan, among others, as possible authors of the text in addition to Bembo. The question of the poem’s authorship remains unresolved to this day. The aim of this article is to analyse the turbulent and hypothesis-rich debate on the attribution of the Renaissance work. The poem has been subjected to internal criticism, i.e. inferences about the author’s person based on content analysis. Historical and bibliographical indicators of the work have also been examined. The article also attempts to answer the question of whether the latest techniques used in the analysis of the linguistic and stylistic features of the text, such as the methods of computer stylometry, could prove helpful in determining the authorship of the Sarca poem.

Латинська мова в інтелектуальному житті європейців ХХ–ХХІ ст.

In the twentieth–twenty-first centuries, Latin is used as the language of European culture, and not only in certain areas of intellectual life. Many scientific journals publish the main text of articles in national languages, accompany them with a Latin abstract, or find a place for Latin poems, humorous stories, crosswords, etc. Some journals were printed entirely in Latin e.g., Latinitas (Vatican), Palaestra Latina (Barcelona), Vox Latina (Saarbrucken), Vita Latina (Avignon), Orbis Latinus (Mendoza), Melissa (Brussels), etc. In the mid-twentieth century, a series of collections of Neo-Latin poetry written by individual authors (Hermann Weller [Tübingen, 1946], Hugo Enrico Paoli [Florence, 1961]), or multinational anthologies were published. Works inspired by dramatic events of history and social and political life of the twentieth–twenty-first centuries stand out among the galaxy of modern neo-Latinists: Hermann Weller’s elegy Y (Tübingen, 1937) – is a pro-foundly allegorical work, a vivid testimony of internal emigration; a collection of neo-Latin poems “Laudes Ukrainae” (“Praise to Ukraine”) by Anna Eliza Radke. “Laudes Ukrainae” includes more than 50 poems in which the poetess’s civic position and attitude to the Russian-Ukrainian war are directly and unequivocally stated. Most of the poems have six language versions: Latin, Ukrainian, Spanish, German, Polish, and French.

‘The rich help of books’: patterns of annotation in Latin and English versions of Abraham Cowley’s Sex Libri Plantarum

ABSTRACT Abraham Cowley’s Latin poem Sex Libri Plantarum, published posthumously in 1668, is arguably his masterpiece, yet it is relatively under-studied. Its rich annotations include scientific – mainly botanical and medical – as well as historical, linguistic, and mythological information, with many classical and early modern quotations. To date, the only published complete English translation remains the 1689 version assembled by Nahum Tate, Six Books of Plants, which features much sparser marginalia. What can these very different patterns of annotation tell us about their creators’ priorities, twenty years apart? To investigate, we quantify and systematically compare the Latin and English notes. We find that the two serve different purposes: while those in Plantarum function as a counterpoint to, and corrective dialogue with, the text, those in Six Books are mainly interpretative. The translators who collaborated on Six Books were actively, even idiosyncratically, selective about how they retained Cowley’s marginalia in English.

A New Latin Poem by Joseph Addison

Abstract Known almost exclusively now as the author of The Spectator and Cato, Joseph Addison was also highly regarded throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a Latin poet. This article presents a new addition to the canon of Addison’s Latin verse: a 57-line hexameter poem entitled Arcus Triumphalis which survives in a unique manuscript copy recently acquired by Addison’s alma mater Magdalen College, Oxford. The article begins by describing the manuscript (scans of the leaves containing Addison’s poem are included), detailing its likely genesis and confirming its attribution of the poem to Addison. Then it reconstructs the contexts of the poem, which describes a firework display put on in St James’s Square on the evening of 2 December 1697 to celebrate William III’s triumphal return to London after concluding the Peace of Ryswick. A third section provides a critical reading of the poem, concentrating on its surprising presentation of William III and its bold use of ekphrasis. The article concludes by assessing the place of Arcus Triumphalis in Addison’s career, in relation to the early development of his Whiggism and as a forerunner of several of his definitive concerns in The Spectator: privacy and the public sphere, urban spectacle, and the aesthetics of looking. An edited text of the poem and an English translation are provided in an appendix.

Facetus and the birth of “European” politeness

Abstract This paper aims to contribute to the study of the first stages of the development of European politeness, through the analysis of the metalanguage of politeness used in two Latin poems with the title Facetus (Facetus: cum nihil utilius and Facetus: moribus et vita), both dating from the twelfth century. These two texts established a fertile genre of behaviour manuals, developed during the Middle Ages both in Latin and in vernacular languages, and illustrate an intermediary moment of transition from ancient conceptualisations of politeness (given that they heavily draw on Roman ideas and literature) to early modern ones. The semantic analysis of the Latin politeness meta-terms used in those poems, such as facetus, decorus, mos or decus, allows us to get a glimpse, through the emic perspective offered by these meta-terms, of the moral order underlying the code of courtly behaviour.

Beyond the Literary Sources of Augurello’s Chrysopoeia

In his Neo-Latin poem Chrysopoeia (1515), the Italian humanist Giovanni Aurelio Augurello often declares to be outdoing the ancients in writing the first alchemical poem in Latin. Is this simply an instance of what E. R. Curtius called outdoing a topos? Or is Augurello’s poem actually venturing onto a metaphorically untrodden path? Based on an analysis of Chrysopoeia, its genesis, and its sources, this article aims to assess the extent of this poem’s novelty. In particular, my interpretation focuses on this text’s poetic transpositions of non-literary sources, and more specifically Geber’s Summa perfectionis and other medieval alchemical texts.

:The Metanarrative Hall of Mirrors: Reflex Action in Fiction and Film

Stewart’s study offers a way to (horizontally) transcend Stam’s volume—by clarifying key reflexive words and by bringing the literary and filmic examples up to date. Not discussed is Christian Metz’s seminal book Impersonal Enunciation.2 Metz, a founding figure of contemporary film theory, linked reflexivity to enunciation, which he understood metatextually as the activity by which certain parts of a filmic text speak about that text as an act. Metz wrote a nuanced study that is nonetheless limited to Stewart’s categories of the technical and the textual. In terms of Stewart’s phonetic readings of Powers (and Steinbeck), I am reminded of Saussure’s unpublished study of concealed anagrams of proper names encoded in Old Latin poems.3 Are the anagrams intentional, encoded by poets, or are they simply a material fact of language? In his biography of Saussure, John Joseph quotes Saussure who, after three years of study, expressed skepticism to Léopold Gautier (his research assistant) regarding the real or imaginary status of the anagrams: “I rather feel that you will finally remain perplexed, since I do not disguise the fact that I have remained so myself—, on the most important point, namely what one is to make of the reality or the phantasmagoria of the entire affair.”4

The possibility of translating ancient Latin poetry: some French, English and Bulgarian versions of Ovidian poetry and of a Latin epitaph

The present text tries to compare different translations and interpretations of Latin poetic works. An everlasting discussion about the possibility to preserve the initial meaning and to transfer original codes into a new language medium, is illustrated within translations in three modern languages, from different linguistic groups – French, Bulgarian and English. Though the examples given in Latin are of different authorships, they all belong to the poetic genre and aim to illustrate how modern languages could translate and interpret classic verses and to what extent contemporary languages are able to stay loyal to the original. Classical Latin poems of Ovid and epigraphic epitaphs are chosen as being well known and challenging for many translators devoted to ancient texts. The poems of the roman poet Ovid have been studied by a lot of interpreters of classical antiquity and those chosen herein like Shilling, Sharankov, Bonniec and Frazer are some of the most representative. In Bulgarian medium a significant scientist in translation of old texts is Nicolay Sharankov whose interest in roman epigraphic inscriptions led him to some outstanding achievements, which are ana-lyzed in this research. The study also compares different traditions and outlooks of how Latin poetry should be transmitted into the so-called source language or langue cible. Many diach-ronic studies show strong and feeble parts of different approaches. An overview of transla-tions made in long periods of time makes possible to outline different paradigms for transmit-ting meaning and content. One less known material referred to is the work of Desjardins and his studies of Latin inscriptions found in Bulgaria.

The Afterlife of St Cuthbert: Place, Texts and Ascetic Tradition, 690–1500

The Afterlife of St Cuthbert: Place, Texts and Ascetic Tradition, 690–1500

“Rede hit sofft”: John Audelay's Practice of Care

“Rede hit sofft”: John Audelay's Practice of Care

"Loquela gravis iuvat": Gower's O deus immense and the Place of Poetry, 1398–1400

Abstract: John Gower's medium-length Latin poem O deus immense , little thought of even by most Gowerians, brings his career into focus. O deus immense synthesizes strands of Gower's self-presentation pursued far more diffusely in his titanic trilogy Mirour de l'omme – Vox clamantis – Confessio Amantis . The place Gower clears for poetry in 1398, 1399, or 1400—the date of O deus immense is uncertain, a point addressed here at length—is characterized by its public, monitory, prophetic, and enigmatic dimensions. Focusing on the historically remote genre of political prophecy, this essay compares O deus immense with other Gowerian and non-Gowerian English political verse in English and Latin datable to 1398–1400, including Bede's Prophecy , an anonymous rhyming English poem of 1400 inedited until recently and therefore, like O deus immense , not factoring into previous critical assessments of the poetry of the Lancastrian coup. Attending to the complex relationship between poetics and politics at the turn of the fifteenth century in England, the essay positions O deus immense as pivotal in Gower's career and essential for an evaluation of what he contributed to the first generation of Lancastrian poetry. Gower's "most significant role" in the field of English political poetry, 1398–1400, was as its leading theorist and most skillful advocate, a role he plays most assiduously in O deus immense ; but it is both a credit to his depth of ambition and an explanation of the often violent contortions of his late Latin style that Gower's arguments for a poetry of moral clarity, social urgency, and political muscle transcend the very ideological commitments that transparently motivate them.