Neo-Latin Poetry, 1500–1700: An English Perspective

“Neo-Latin” is the term most commonly used to describe the Latin written in the Renaissance and early modern period, marked by a strong attempt to imitate classical style as well as to resurrect or reinvent a range of classical Latin literary genres and forms (such as Horatian odes or epigrams in the style of Martial), many of which were adapted, extended, or transformed in the light of contemporary religious and political imperatives. Neo-Latin is the generally accepted term, in English as well as the other European languages (French la litterature néo-latine; German, neulateinische Literatur), but it is in some ways an unfortunate one: in modern English, at least, the prefix “neo-” tends to carry a pejorative implication, suggesting something not only new, but somewhat false, derivative, or extreme. Such associations impair our ability to appreciate this literature on its own terms. Early modern Latin was no one’s mother tongue, but it remained a spoken language: educational establishments from school to university generally insisted on spoken Latin throughout this period, often at the cost of corporal punishment, and Latin was also widely used as a lingua franca on official occasions and in diplomatic contexts. In written form, the language was even more widespread, and Latin writings were, throughout our period, a conventional means by which authors sought to secure a readership beyond their own country.¹ Non-native speakers and writers of Latin produced great Latin literature, in this period as in many others, just as non-native speakers and writers of English around the world have done and indeed continue to do so. For an ambitious early modern poet hoping to establish an international reputation, writing verse in Latin was a natural choice.

Neo-Latin poetry is a vast territory and one to which there remain relatively few field guides (although in this respect the literature is developing with encouraging speed).² A chapter of this length cannot hope to do more than sketch the parameters of the subject, give a sense of the interest of the material, and suggest some avenues for further investigation: although it is focused on English writers, Latin poetry of the period was a European literature, and it would be very artificial to discuss their achievement without regard for the broader context of European Latin poetry from Petrarch onward or, for that matter, without consideration of the relationship between the forms and genres of neo-Latin verse and its precedents in classical Latin literature.

Petrarch (1304–73) is commonly considered the first writer of neo-Latin—although Petrarch, like many of the great literary figures of our period, wrote in both Latin and the vernacular—and major works, whether literary, scientific, or philosophical, were still being produced in Latin throughout the eighteenth century and even (in some instances) beyond, especially in Northern and Eastern Europe. For much of the period between 1400 and 1700, Latin was the usual medium for many types of writing—especially forms that required or hoped to obtain an international readership—and a realistic option for many other sorts, including most poetic genres. Almost all of the poetic forms that were to become central to European Latin poetry between 1500 and 1700 were pioneered by Italian Latin poets in the preceding 150 years: the time frame of this chapter rules out detailed consideration, but I shall often refer to these poets and their publications—to attempt to read, for instance, British Latin poetry of the sixteenth century without any knowledge of Petrarch and Pontano (1429–1503) would be nearly as misleading as to ignore the relevance of Virgil, Catullus, or Horace.

The period 1500–1700, often used as the approximate parameters for the “Renaissance” period in England and other northern European countries, saw the greatest production of neo-Latin poetry in Britain, France, and Germany and, indeed, in the latter part of this period, also outside Europe—especially the Americas.³ During the seventeenth century, the rapidly expanding Jesuit order, which placed a high value on close study of classical literature, began to produce a particularly large quantity of Latin prose, verse, and drama, much of which is of a high literary quality.⁴

Major poets of this period very often produced significant poetry in both Latin and the vernacular: in England alone, important examples of this kind of “dual” identity include Campion, Milton, Herbert, Crashaw, Marvell, and Cowley. Although a very small number of such poets have attracted at least some scholarly attention as Latin authors—Milton is the best example—in many other cases, students even at quite an advanced stage could be forgiven for being unaware that such poets wrote any Latin at all.

In marked contrast to the obscurity of this material in modern scholarship, Latin poetry of the period had in its own time an international reach: the Latin epigrams of the Welsh poet John Owen (c. 1563–1622), for instance, were translated into English, French, German, and Spanish and reprinted multiple times across Western Europe.⁵ The Polish Jesuit Casimir Sarbiewski (1595–1640) similarly achieved a European-wide fame in his own lifetime, as the large number of imitations and translations of his poetry demonstrates.⁶ Latin poets across Europe (and beyond) could write in conversation with one another just as they did with Virgil, Ovid, or Horace—it is very misleading to imply, as some accounts of early modern Latin poetry risk doing, that each individual Latin poet of this period sat down to write a kind of mindless pastiche (at worst) or (at best) responsive reinterpretation solely of the principal classical models.

There is plentiful evidence of literary influence between early modern Latin poets, both in specific textual interactions and allusions and, at the more general level, of motif or theme—Milton’s Latin verse, for instance, demonstrates nuanced interaction with the Latin poetry of Petrarch, Campion, and Buchanan, as well as of the classical Latin poets.⁷ At a much more general level, the Basia (“Kisses”) of the Dutch Johannes Secundus (1511–36), itself an intense reworking of language and imagery derived from Catullus and Martial, prompted several centuries of imitations across Europe and beyond.⁸ Both printed and manuscript verse collections and anthologies were a popular format, often juxtaposing poets from quite different geographical, vernacular, or religious backgrounds.

But Latin poetry of the time was far from being a closed system influencing only other Latin poetry: although modern disciplinary distinctions have meant it has not attracted much scholarly attention, there is plentiful evidence of interaction, an ongoing literary “conversation,” between vernacular and Latin literature.⁹ Translations or close imitations are one of the most straightforward instances of this kind of conversation. The sequence of Latin love elegies by the German poet Paulus Melissus (1539–1602), for instance, includes a Latin translation of a French poem from Ronsard’s Continuation des Amours adapted to suit the context of his sequence.¹⁰ Ben Jonson’s short and often anthologized lyric “The Hourglass” (“Do but consider this small dust”) is in fact a fairly close translation of a Latin epigram by Girolamo Amaltei (“Perspicuus vitro pulvis qui dividis horas”).¹¹ George Herbert’s enigmatic Latin poem “Aethiopissa”—in which a Ethiopian woman woos Cestus, a white man—attracted several English imitations and responses.¹²

Contemporary manuscript evidence demonstrates the extent to which this kind of “conversation” between Latin and vernacular poetry was recognized by readers: Jonson’s poem is printed in the 1640 Underwoods without any allusion to its model (although in other contexts Jonson often signposted his borrowings to an almost officious extent), but in one Bodleian manuscript¹³ we find a transcription of Jonson’s English poem accompanied by a copy of the Latin original. The Latin text in the manuscript is slightly corrupt, but the alterations (or misrememberings) of the Latin—particularly a persistent change from the third to the second person—perhaps suggest the influence of Jonson’s English version, with its strong second-person address in the opening lines.

Similarly, popular poems, whether in Latin or the vernacular, are frequently found in manuscript collections and personal notebooks accompanied by ad hoc translations; for instance, of a Latin epigram into an English couplet or an English lyric into Latin Alcaics (the most common lyric stanza form in Horace’s Odes). Verses of this sort are often satiric or scurrilous. Cambridge University Library MS Add. 4138, a student’s commonplace book of the early seventeenth century, preserves two such Latin epigrams, both of only two lines each, accompanied by English versions in rhyming couplets:

Epitaphs. of S^r Fra: Wal: & S^r Ph: Sid:

Nullus Francisco tumulus nullusque Philipo,

Christoforo mons est, ac tumulus cumulus.

Philipe and Fra: haue noe Tombe,

for Christopher hath all the roome./

Hic Catharina jacet, jacet, vrsula, barbara, tres hae,

Frater et Andreas qui lapidauit eas.

Kate, Ursley, Barbara that’s 3. Virgins lye here,

And frier Andrew, whom those 3. did beare./

(Cambridge University Library, MS Add. 4138, 47v and 48r)¹⁴

Other examples are much more sophisticated: both the choice to translate and the mode of that translation can amount to an interpretation, sometimes to marked rhetorical effect. When three admirers of Ben Jonson chose to translate his bitter ode of professional and artistic disappointment, the “Ode to Himself” (written after the commercial failure of his late play, The New Inn, in 1629) into Latin verse, the form of that translation—lyric stanzas of Horatian or Pindaric form—and the choice of phrases drawn from Horace himself are essential to the attempt at consolation. Jonson had long styled himself as an English “Horace,” and the flattering recasting of his English poetry into pointedly Horatian Latin reinforces that identification.¹⁵

A particularly fascinating demonstration of the interpenetration of imitation and translation in this period is provided by Thomas Watson’s 1583 Hekatompathia, or Passionate Centurie of Love. Essentially a sonnet sequence, the highly self-conscious presentation of this work, with introductory notes to each poem as well as marginal annotations, offers a kind of “worked example” of one man’s creative response to fifteenth- and sixteenth-century European literature, both Latin and vernacular. The prefatory material includes two Latin poems as well as five in English, while each of the hundred sonnets—mostly in English, although five are in Latin—are introduced by a note indicating the subject, structural divisions, mythological sources, and (in most cases) specific models. Those models are drawn widely from texts in Latin, Greek, French, and Italian, as well as Watson’s own English and Latin verse: the authors to whom Watson refers most often are Forcatulus (the Latin poetry of the French poet Etienne Forcadel, 1534–73), Ovid, Strozza (Tito Vespasiano Strozzi, 1424–1505), Virgil, Horace, Petrarch (1304–74), Seraphine (Serafino Dell’Aquila, 1466–1500), Agnolo Firenzuola (1493–1543), Ronsard, and Sophocles. Of the Latin poets he quotes directly (excluding himself), nine are classical or late antique, eight neo-Latin authors. Moreover, his prefatory comments often identify a “nested” series of imitations: introducing poem 66, for instance, he identifies both his model in Petrarch and the source for Petrarch’s poem in Aeneid 4; whereas the latter part of poem 91 is, he states, modeled on Horace Odes 1.5 but also the imitation of that poem in Italian by Firenzuola.¹⁶ Watson’s explication of his method is unusually clear, but the almost equal balance between classical and neo-Latin source material and the regular combination of both with vernacular texts demonstrates the extent to which Latin and vernacular poetry could be interdependent for educated writers of this period.

Generic distinctions play an important role in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetics—both Latin and English—although authors provide quite varied accounts of the relationship between genre, subject matter, and metrical form: some offer very broad categories of literary classification, such as Antonio Minturno’s De poeta (1559), which devotes a book each to epic, tragedy, comedy, and lyric; at the other extreme, J. C. Scaliger’s enormously influential Poetices libri septem (1561) sets out in great detail fine-grained distinctions between a host of subgenres, with an emphasis on their rhetorical function.¹⁷ This mode of humanist scholarship on genre influenced theories of English literary forms as well. Campion’s Art of English Poesie (1602), for instance, is concerned with the adaption of classical (i.e., quantitative) meters to English poetry, and the work is arranged accordingly by meter, not genre. Nevertheless, Campion distinguishes among epic (heroic) poems, epigrams, elegies, odes, and anacreontics.

Some genres are identified very closely with a particular metrical form: “elegies” are identified by their meter (elegiac couplets of a dactylic hexameter followed by a pentameter) more clearly than by any other feature; epic verse is always in hexameters in Latin. Others have a much looser connection: didactic poems are very often in hexameters but are sometimes (like Ovid’s Ars amatoria) in elegiac couplets; Abraham Cowley’s Plantarum Libri Sex (“Six Books of Plants”; 1668) is at once a didactic work on plants, in six books, and at the same time a compendium of Latin verse genres, including elegy, epigram, and ode, rising to something closely resembling epic diction and action in books five and six.¹⁸ We can discern in Cowley’s project something of the ambition to combine and even transcend generic distinctions that has been identified in Paradise Lost.¹⁹

Latin verse publications in this period very often demonstrate careful awareness of generic distinctions, reflected in the choice of titles and subsections, but may combine several such groupings within a single publication. Milton’s much-studied Poems of 1645, for instance, is arranged in three parts, with two major sections of poetry either side of Milton’s masque, Comus. The first of these sections is in English (with some Italian), the latter in Latin (with some Greek). The Latin portion of the volume is further divided into a book of elegies (“Elegiarum Liber primus”) and a book of “silvae” (“Sylvarum Liber”), including poems in hexameter, iambics, and various lyric meters. A much more obscure publication makes a similar point: in 1585, the newly formed Oxford University Press published an anonymous pamphlet, In Guil. Parry Proditorem, condemning a recent assassination attempt against the life of Queen Elizabeth I. The beautifully produced twelve-page pamphlet is subtitled Odae & Epigrammata and consists accordingly of two distinct halves: three odes in Horatian meters (two in Alcaics, one in Sapphics) followed by a sequence of twelve epigrams in elegiac couplets. Both halves of the book—which is almost certainly the work of William Gager (1555–1622)—are concerned with the wickedness of the plot and the great blessing of Elizabeth’s survival, but the theme is treated quite differently in the two sections in accordance with the conventions of ode and epigram. Assessing the purpose and effect of a publication of this sort without any sense of generic expectations is misleading; but so, too, is an approach that treats both halves entirely independently.

Epigrams in both English and Latin are ubiquitous in this period, and they circulated extremely widely, often accompanied by translations: major British epigram collections include those of Thomas More (1478–1535; epigrams first published in 1518), Thomas Campion (1567–1620, epigrams first published in 1595), John Owen (c. 1564–c.1622, first book of epigrams published 1606) and, in English but to strongly classicizing effect, Ben Jonson (1572–1637, Epigrammes published 1616). Their brevity and focused “point” (argutia) makes epigrams both memorable and functional, ideally suited for conveying a single idea whether satiric, didactic, or panegyric. Stylistically, they are marked by concision and wordplay, with a tendency toward the telling pun.²⁰

But epigrams can work together as well: epigram collections may build up multiple individual “points,” whether on similar, related, or quite different themes or subjects, into a whole. The effect may be of various angles on a given subject or person or of creating through shared imagery links between apparently quite disparate topics. We find this approach in many epigram “sequences” on a given theme, whether nested within a larger collection of epigrams or a more mixed selection of verse. Camden’s sequence of epigrams on the death of Philip Sidney, for instance, works over nine poems, each complete in itself, to create a range of related associations, effectively aspects of the Sidney myth, including the thematic pun upon his name (“Sidnaeus”) and the Latin word for a constellation (“sidus” or “sydus”); his heroic exploits (emphasized by the use of the hexameter in the seventh poem); and his poetic genius. The first poem of the sequence introduces these concepts with a series of resonant Latin abstractions, themselves associated with one another by their sound: Ars (“art”), Mars (“war”), and Mors (“death” that has stolen Sidney and made him a star).²¹

Similarly, large epigram collections that include poems on a wide range of vices and virtues and the characters that embody them—such as those by Martial, Owen, and Jonson—may aim to depict an entire society in all its various parts. Owen says as much in the third poem of his first book:

3. Ad Ioannem Hoskins Iurisconsultum, Poetam Ingeniosissimum. De Suo Libro

Hic liber est mundus: homines sunt, Hoskine, versus,

Invenies paucos hic, ut in orbe, bonos.

3. To John Hoskins, Lawyer and Talented Poet, on His [i.e., Owen’s] Book

This book is the world: Hoskins, you’ll find

Few good men in the world, few good poems here.

Just as societies are structured around the powers that govern them and the relation of each member to those structures, so epigram collections of this sort typically begin with a series of programmatic addresses: to the king, an important patron, to the reader, or the book itself. Campion, Owen, and Jonson all begin their epigram books with sequences of this kind.

Alternatively, we can see epigram collections as functioning as a kind of poetic deconstruction or analysis, the sifting of a significant person or experience into its constituent elements, each dwelt on individually. This approach can be close to some kinds of prayer or meditation—such as reciting the rosary while meditating on events in the life of Christ—and we find epigram sequences used in just this way. George Herbert’s sequence, Passio Discerpta (“The Passion in pieces,” or “torn apart”) is a fine example: this sequence of twenty-one Latin epigrams on the stages of the crucifixion as described in the Gospels, corresponds to Herbert’s single long English poem “The Sacrifice.” The epigram form allows Herbert to focus intensely on each moment of the passion narrative. The effect is strongly devotional, but retains the characteristic features of Latin epigram, including puns and wordplay. In a striking intervention, Herbert concludes a four-line epigram in his own voice. The poem is In Clavos (“On the Nails [of the crucifixion],” Passio Discerpta 14):

Iam meus es: nunc Te teneo: Pastorque prehensus

Hoc ligno, his clavis est, quasi Falce sua.

Now you are mine: I hold you now: the Shepherd is seized

By this wood, by these nails—as if by his own crook.

Herbert speaks as if he himself held the wood and the nails, while Christ the shepherd is imagined caught by his own “hook” or “crook” (although falx usually means a pruning-hook or scythe, it seems to refer here to the shepherd’s crook). Andrew Marvell’s (1621–78) poem, “Damon the Mower,” contains a similar image: “And there among the grass fell down, / By his own scythe, the Mower mown” (“Damon the Mower,” 79–80).

Finally, an epigram itself may be the focus of this kind of sustained attention, as in sequences of related translations or versions of a single poem. The first of three university commemorative volumes for Sir Philip Sidney after his death in 1586, for instance, opens with an English sonnet written by King James of Scotland, followed by a sequence of Latin translations of the poem—first by the king himself and then eight further Latin versions by various members of the court.²² Such focused attention by several authors on the rewriting of a single significant text has points in common with religious attention to scripture or scriptural events, and it has obvious panegyric force, but it is also a mode of competition. By presenting both target text and a series of competing translations, the sequence invites assessment and adjudication.

The division among Latin epigrams, elegies, and lyric poetry as a whole is a porous one. In classical scholarship, “lyric” describes, in origin, songs sung to the accompaniment of the lyre and, by extension, to Latin and Greek verse in the meters associated with those songs. The main Roman poets to adapt Greek lyric meters to Latin verse were Catullus and (more thoroughly) Horace, in his Odes. Only a handful of later authors in antiquity made any attempt to replicate lyric meters in Latin and none on the scale of Horace: we find examples of Horatian lyric meters in Statius’ Silvae, in the choruses of Senecan tragedy, and in the early Christian hymns of Ambrose and Prudentius. It was not until the Renaissance, however, that any author made a sustained attempt to replicate the full range of Horace’s meters: Francesco Filelfo (1398–1481) published his five books of Odes in the mid-1450s. Most of the major Italian humanist poets of the fifteenth century composed at least a handful of odes in Horatian meters, most often hymns in sapphics or alcaics. As the composition and publication of neo-Latin Horatian odes proliferated, we find them suited to various contexts and occasions: individual odes of praise or celebration—whether printed in memorial volumes or pamphlets or recited at public occasions—and poems in lyric meters included in larger collections of epigrams as well as dedicated sequences and entire books of odes.

Filelfo’s Odes, quite unlike Horace’s—which notoriously resist narrative interpretation—function as a kind of “verse autobiography,” and we find other examples of imaginative (and unclassical) sequencing in lyric books. The third and fourth books of Abraham Cowley’s Plantarum Libri Sex, for instance, stage a competition for political rulership among the (largely female) flowers on the banks of the Thames in 1660, the year of the restoration of King Charles II, presided over by Flora: each flower makes her case in her own ode, linked by narrative sequences in elegiac couplets.²³ Whereas most of Cowley’s herbs and flowers have their origins in Ovid, and accordingly either relate or allude to an Ovidian story of rape, pursuit, and transformation, the Corona Imperialis flower (“Imperial Crown”) makes a point of her unliterary, non-Ovidian, and Latin (rather than Greek) form:

Mî glorianti insignibus imperî,

Flori invidetis fortè Novitio,                                    690

Fraudíque mî forsan futurum est,

Nomina non habuisse Graeca.

Plebeia forsan Filia pauperum

Dicar parentum, quod traho originem

Nullis pudendam fabulosis                                          695

Aut pueris superum aut puellis,

Huiusce mundi non vetus incola,

Rexi per annos innumerabiles,

Et Bactra Susásque & beati

Floriferos Orientis Hortos.                                         700

Perhaps you envy me glorying as I am with my insignia of power, an upstart flower, and perhaps it will be a source of trouble for me that I have no Greek name.

Perhaps I shall be called the plebeian daughter of poor parents, because the origin I derive has no source of shame in well-known boys or girls of the gods, nor am I an old inhabitant of this world, and yet I ruled for uncounted years, over Bactra and Susa and the flowery gardens of the blessed East.

The flower’s knowing self-presentation and her dismissive attitude toward the typical patterns of Ovidian myth are entertaining and arguably appropriate to implicitly Horatian form (the Alcaic stanza in which the poem is composed is associated with serious and public poetry). Her story is “unclassical”—that is, it is not a tale of a girl or nymph pursued by a god, unlike many of the herbs and flowers of the collection, such as Mint, Laurel, and Myrrh, who are named for characters in the Metamorphoses. But there is a didactic point here, too: according to Cowley’s note, this Eastern plant had only recently become known in the West. She goes on to link her queenly authority with that of Dionysus, another arrival from the East. Her pointed lack of mythological origin helps us to remember that the plant is itself “unclassical,” a recent import to Europe.

Horatian lyric meters are challenging for the poet because they consist of sequences of long and short syllables in almost entirely fixed patterns: there are very few places where the poet may choose between a long or a short quantity. (This is in contrast to elegiac couplets and dactylic hexameters, which offer more choices of this sort.) Nevertheless, the two most common Horatian meters, the Sapphic and Alcaic stanzas, were widely adopted, and we find examples of compositions in these forms even, for instance, in schoolboy notebooks of the period, as well as in poems for the most important occasions: several of the Latin poems written by John Leland for the occasion of the coronation of Anne Boleyn in 1533, for instance, are in sapphics. Alcaic stanzas in particular were associated with the grandest forms of public poetry, of political praise and celebration, since Horace used this form for his so-called “Roman” odes (Odes 3.1–6) and several of the most ambitious panegyric odes of his fourth book.²⁴ But Renaissance Latin poets also introduced a new lyric form: although Horace’s most public poetry of praise is often in direct imitation of Pindar, he made no attempt to replicate Pindar’s notoriously complex metrical schemes in Latin verse. Humanist poets, beginning with Benedetto Lampridio (1478–1540), introduced this “Latin Pindaric”: probably the most famous in British Latin verse is Milton’s bravura late ode Ad Joannem Rousium.

Metrical imitation of Horace was not, however, confined to individual pieces: metrical variety was a particular focus for literary competition and display. George Herbert’s Latin collection, Musae responsoriae, is a direct response to Andrew Melville’s Anti-Tami-Cami-Categoriae (1620) and also the most metrically varied of Herbert’s four Latin verse collections, showcasing ten different metrical forms. Herbert’s virtuosity seems to be pointed—Herbert associates poetry with music, and Melville’s work attacks church music, among other elements of Anglican ritual. Melville’s poem is itself in sapphics, a metrical choice mocked in Herbert’s fifth poem (“On the Type of Metre”). Metrical display as a mode of criticism, or to invite comparison, also seems to be a feature of the 1602 publication of Elizabeth Jane Weston’s second book of poems. The volume includes no fewer than five Latin odes in praise of Weston by the German poet Paulus Melissus (Paul Schede, 1539–1602): for all his extravagant praise of Weston, his own literary display has an edge to it. The four odes are in Horatian meters: one in alcaics (a very long poem of twenty-two stanzas), one in sapphics, one in the meter usually known as the third asclepiad, and, finally, the very rare “greater sapphic,” which appears only once in Horace.²⁵ Weston’s own verse is almost exclusively in elegiac couplets, a much easier and more common metrical choice and one with less ambitious generic associations. Although he is purportedly praising Weston, Melissus’s display or metrical authority seems to be intended to demonstrate his own superior skill.

We have already noted that individual lyric pieces are often included in collections of epigrams: Wright’s 1637 anthology of epigrams, Delitiae delitiarum, for instance, includes several poems in lyric meters.²⁶ Sonnets may strike us as an unquestionably lyric form in English, but neo-Latin poets often link vernacular sonnets with Latin epigrams: several of Campion’s “ayres,” for instance, have parallel versions in his Latin epigram collections. The term “elegiac” is strongly associated in classical scholarship with Latin love elegy—medium-length poems of love and subjection by Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid. There is a rich neo-Latin tradition of Latin love elegy, but elegiac couplets are also the most commonly used meter for epigrams (other common epigram meters are Catullan hendecasyllables and iambic trimeters).²⁷ When epigram collections include poems on erotic themes in elegiac couplets, it is hard to establish a clear generic division. Both Caspia and Mellea, for instance, appear repeatedly as love objects in Campion’s love elegies, but also in the second book of epigrams: nineteen epigrams are addressed to one or the other (or, in one case, both of them). This consistency invites the reader to construct a kind of narrative more usually associated with collections of elegy than epigram.²⁸

Just as shorter elegiac and lyric poems are found in epigram collections, we also find among neo-Latin elegies some markedly long and ambitious poems, including verse letters and pastoral poems. Although pastoral is conventionally a hexameter genre, elegiac poems of mourning and commemoration often overlap with pastoral forms. Poems of mourning are a feature of classical pastoral, one that was much imitated and expanded on by the Latin poets of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, from Petrarch onward and, especially, for English writers, in the wake of Sidney and Spenser. The 1587 Oxford anthology on the death of Sidney, for instance, prints eclogues by William Gager (no. 33) and Francis Mason (no. 88) alongside odes and epigrams.²⁹ Thomas Watson published in 1590 a pastoral elegy, Meliboeus, on the death of Walsingham, in which he describes England as an Arcadia that now risks decay and fragmentation in the absence of its guiding statesman. The political allegory of such pieces has its roots in Virgil’s Eclogues, written during a period of intense political uncertainty in the 40s and 30s bc. Virgil’s collection both mourns losses—of individuals and of song itself—and celebrates the dawning of a new age: the “god” in Rome who restores Tityrus’ land in Eclogue 1 has been widely identified since antiquity with Octavian (the future Augustus), and Eclogue 4 is such a potent blend of prophetic motifs on the dawning of a new Golden Age that it was long interpreted as a prophecy of the birth of Christ. Accordingly, we find politically allegorical pastoral in a celebratory as well as an elegiac vein: James Kennedy’s poem on the restoration, Diadema kai Mitra, seu Daphnidis et Druydum Reditus, Ecloga Bucolia Celebratus, published in Aberdeen in 1662, is a pastoral dialogue between two Scottish shepherds, Corydon and Moeris, closely modeled on Virgil’s first eclogue. But here, the mood is unquestionably positive: a pointed reversal of the grief—for the loss of land and of song itself—that marks Virgil’s collection.

As we have seen, we find medium-length pastoral poems of up to around two hundred lines in collections otherwise dedicated to the shorter forms of odes, elegies, and epigrams. Such pieces lie on the boundary between lyric (broadly understood) and the longer hexameter form of epic verse.³⁰ Epic was an enormously productive genre in Renaissance and early modern Latin writing. Panegyrical epic, dedicated to the praise of usually contemporary rulers in the terms of classical heroism, had in fact been composed almost continuously throughout late antiquity and the Middle Ages: Italian Latin epic of this sort in the fifteenth century includes the Sphortias of Francesco Filelfo (1398–1481) and Tito Vespasiano Strozzi’s (1424–1505) Borsias, among many others. There is no inventory of European neo-Latin epic as a whole, but Ludwig Braun’s useful survey gives a sense of the scale: he identifies and describes more than eighty Latin epic poems written between 1500 and 1700 in France alone.³¹ The adventures of Jesuits on missionary expeditions around the world and the discovery and conquest of the New World were both fertile sources for epic poetry in our period.³² Britain, too, produced Latin epic, often of pointed political relevance: James Philp’s Grameid is an (unfinished) five books on the Jacobite rising of 1689.³³ Abraham Cowley’s (also unfinished) Davideis is an important Biblical epic precursor to Paradise Lost, the first book of which he translated himself into Latin verse; and although Cowley’s completed Plantarum Libri Sex is a didactic work, the last two books are in increasingly epic hexameters: book 5 includes a prophecy of the fall of Europe and the rise of the New World, and book 6 describes the civil war, regicide, and restoration, concluding with English triumph in the Dutch wars.³⁴

But perhaps the most interesting use of “epic” form in British Latin writing of this period is the “epyllion” or “mini-epic,” a hard-to-define hexameter form that, like pastoral verse, tends to be of medium length (generally of several hundred lines). The classical precedents are Alexandrian in feel: Callimachus’ Hecale, Catullus 64 (“The Marriage of Peleus and Thetis”), and the Ciris in the Appendix Virgiliana (a collection of poems traditionally attributed to Virgil that were more widely read in the Renaissance than they are by contemporary classicists).³⁵ Also influential are the individual nested narratives of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Orpheus and Eurydice passage from the end of Virgil’s fourth georgic. Later Greek models, not much read by modern classicists, were more popular in this period than they are today: Thomas Watson’s Raptus Helenae, for instance, is a translation of a poem by the fifth-century ad Greek poet Coluthus.³⁶

The term “epyllion” is itself neither classical nor Renaissance in origin, and there is debate as to whether it exists as a meaningful generic category in describing neo-Latin verse at all.³⁷ Nevertheless, early modern England was a particularly creative generator of poems of this sort, and the parallel phenomenon in English verse has been well described, partly because Shakespeare himself wrote two such poems (Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece).³⁸ In Latin, we find at least two distinct subsets: poems on mythological characters usually with a strongly erotic flavor and influenced by Ovid in particular (such as Campion’s strange poem, the Umbra) and pieces of a similar length and marked by similarly extravagant diction and lingering sensuous description but focused instead on recognizably epic themes, even if they tend not to contain much extended action.

The only cluster of neo-Latin epyllia that have attracted attention as a group are the set of poems written on the “Gunpowder Plot” of 1605, which belong to this latter category and are marked by their frankly enjoyable descriptions of the extravagant wickedness of Satan and their set-pieces in (interchangeably) papal Rome or Hell itself. This group includes Francis Herring’s Pietas Pontificia (1606), Alexander Yule’s Descriptio Horrendi Paricidii (1607), Michael Wallace’s In Serenissimi regis Iacobi … Liberationem (1606), Phineas Fletcher, Locustae vel Pietas Iesuitica (1611; published 1627), Thomas Campion’s De Pulverea Coniuratione, and Milton’s In Quintum Novembris (1626).³⁹ This group of poems has attracted attention on account of Milton’s contribution to the form, but there is undoubtedly more work to be done: British Library MS Add 78521, for instance, preserves a Latin Gunpowder Plot poem composed by John Evelyn and inscribed on the back “Verses spoken by me / att Oxon on Nov: 5 / 1700.” The poem adopts many of the motifs of the earlier plot poems to create a (rather enjoyable) air of wickedness and menace, complete with the compulsory treacherous Jesuits.

There are, moreover, plenty of other epyllia of this period of equal interest. Hard to classify, but strongly indebted in tone and structure to Catullus 64, is Scipio Gentili’s extraordinary Nereus, published to honor the birth of Philip Sidney’s daughter Elizabeth in 1584. Like the wedding of Peleus and Thetis in Catullus 64—which will lead, of course, to the birth of Achilles—the birth of Elizabeth is accompanied by a lengthy prophecy. George Herbert’s “Triumphus Mortis” (“The Triumph of Death”), on the other hand, has much in common with the “plot” poems, although it has not to my knowledge been discussed in connection with them. Just over a hundred lines long, in florid epic style and to some comic effect, it gives an ironic account of the origins of warfare, beginning with a brawl at a country festival. (This passage is similar to an account of the origin of satiric and invective verse in Horace, Epistles 2.1.139–155.) The centerpiece is a detailed description of the construction and effect of the cannon (lines 51–84), although the poem ends not with firearms but with gunpowder. The lavish enjoyment of the style is nominally justified by the presentation of the poem as the speech of Death himself. A passage on the inventor of gunpowder gives a flavor of the material:

Dicite, vos Furiae, qua gaudet origine Monstrum.

Nox Aetnam, noctemque Chaos genuere priores.

Aetna Cacum ignivomum dedit, hic Ixiona multis

Cantatum; deinde Ixion cum nubibus atris

Congrediens genuit Monachum, qui limen opacae

Triste colens cellae, noctuque & Daemone plenum,

Protulit horrendum hoc primus cum pulvere monstrum.

Tell me, Furies, what origin the Monster rejoices in!

Night begat Aetna, and Chaos first gave rise to Night.

Aetna produced Cacus, who vomits fire, and Cacus Ixion,

The subject of so many songs; then Ixion, mingling with black clouds,

Produced a Monk, who, dwelling on the gloomy threshold

Of a shadowy cell, filled with Night and Demons,

First produced with powder this dreadful prodigy.

We would certainly have a much better understanding of Elizabethan and Jacobean literature if Latin poems—including whole genres such as the epyllion—were considered alongside the English forms to which they are closely related.⁴⁰

A great deal of British Latin poetry remains to be located, transcribed, edited, and translated. As the examples given throughout this article have indicated, Latin verse of this period was published and circulated in a variety of contexts, including pamphlets of a single author’s work in a single form, often even a single poem; larger publications of organized collections that cut across classical genres (i.e., by combining odes and epigrams); and works that printed both Latin and vernacular poetry by the same poet. These kinds of publication are at least relatively easy to identify in library catalogues, and online databases such as Early English Books Online (which reproduces many Latin volumes) have made working with such material a great deal easier than in the past.

Verse anthologies are an important feature of the literary culture of the period. Here, Early English Books Online (EEBO) is of only limited use because many of the most influential and widely circulated anthologies of neo-Latin verse, such as Jan Gruter’s collections of works from Italy, France, Germany, and the Low Countries, were not printed in England.⁴¹ The two volumes of the Delitiae Poetarum Scotorum, for instance, by far the most substantial collection of Scottish neo-Latin verse, is not available on the EEBO database because it was printed in Amsterdam, although it is the subject of a major research project at Glasgow University that promises to make available in electronic form texts and translations of around a quarter of the complete work.⁴²

But easily identifiable Latin literary publications of this sort are only one mode of Latin verse publication in the period. A great wealth of additional Latin literary material appears elsewhere: in anthologies and memorial and commemorative volumes, as inscriptions on tombstones and monuments, and as dedicatory and paratextual material to volumes that may be largely in English. Finally, there are manuscript sources for Latin poetry. A large number of manuscript miscellanies and personal notebooks of the period in question have survived, especially of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and many of these volumes preserve Latin as well as English verse. Unfortunately, locating this material is challenging: the first-line indexes of verse in the Bodleian, Huntington, and Folger libraries do not include Latin poetry, and manuscript catalogue entries of the major libraries are still only patchily available online. Even in print form, they are often only very minimally descriptive of any content beyond the English verse of well-known authors. Many of the approaches that have led in recent years to exciting work on English literary material in manuscripts and early printed books could usefully be applied to Latin texts.

For texts that have already attracted some editorial attention, the range of promising critical approaches is wide. There is a great deal of information of historical interest contained in Latin literary writings of the period: better editions and awareness of these texts would enhance their visibility to early modern historians. From a literary perspective, scholarship has tended to focus on the connections between the Latin poetry of a given major author (often described as juvenilia) and his more mature or more famous English work: this has been a productive angle in the case of John Milton, for instance. In other cases, such as that of George Herbert, a perceived lack of connection or continuity between the conventional characterization of the English work and the form and tone of the Latin has perhaps contributed to the neglect of the Latin writing: by contrast, more sustained and nuanced attention to Herbert’s Latin poetry might change our sense of his poetic character overall.⁴³

As we have seen, there is much work that remains to be done on the interaction between Latin and vernacular poetry. This chapter has given several brief examples of various kinds of textual relationship that have gone largely unstudied, including the translation and retranslation of individual poems from Latin to English and vice versa; poets who wrote only or mostly in Latin, such as John Owen, but who were widely read by those who wrote in both Latin and English; and the relationship between poetry written in England—whether in English or Latin—and the wealth of neo-Latin material produced across Europe in the previous two centuries. As well as effective editorial work to establish these connections, nuanced reading is required to appreciate and explicate the intertextual conversations in such pieces among classical, Renaissance, and contemporary material.

Writing of just this relationship between Latin—the living Latin of the early modern world—and the vernacular, George Steiner writes: “It is scarcely possible to interpret coherently the rhetoric of European literatures, the key notions of sublimity, of satire, of laughter, which they embody and articulate without a just awareness of the Latin ‘implication,’ of the unbroken, often almost subconscious negotiations of intimacy or of distance between the author in the vulgate and the Latin mould.”⁴⁴ The Latin poetry of Renaissance and early modern Europe is fascinating in itself: varied, revealing, and often beautiful. But even those whose first interest and priority is English literature are missing out if they know nothing of the Latin poetry that was both read and written by every kind of English author in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.