An Anthology of European Neo-Latin Literature

Gesine Manuwald, Daniel Hadas, Lucy R. Nicholas, Gesine Manuwald, Daniel Hadas, Lucy R. Nicholas

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350157309
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Lenguas antiguas

Compiled by a team of international experts, this volume showcases the best of the huge abundance of literature written in Latin in Europe from about 1500 to 1800. A general introduction provides readers with the context they need before diving into the 19 high-quality short Latin extracts and English translations. Together these texts present a rich panorama of the different literary genres, styles and themes that flourished at the time, and include authors such as Erasmus, Buchanan, Leibniz and Newton, along with less well-known writers. From the vast array of material available, a varied and meaningful sample of texts has been carefully curated by the editors of the volume. Passages not only exhibit literary merit or historical importance, but also illustrate the role of the complete texts from which they have been selected in the development of Neo-Latin literature. They reflect the wide range of authors writing in Latin in early modern Europe, as well as the importance of Latin in the history of ideas. As with all volumes in the series, section introductions and accompanying notes on every text provide orientation on the material for students.

1

A Pastoral Exchange on the Treatment of Poets

Battista Spagnoli Mantovano (1447–1516), Adolescentia 5.1–23, 68–91, 111–25

Bobby Xinyue

Introduction

Battista Spagnoli (1447–1516) was one of the most prolific writers of Latin verse in the Renaissance, with a total output of around 55,000 verses to his name. Often referred to as ‘Mantuanus’ (or, in England since the Renaissance, ‘Mantuan’), from his birthplace, Mantua (where his Spanish family had settled since 1435),¹ he began his education with Gregorio Tifernate and Giorgio Merula, before moving to Padua in the early 1460s to study philosophy. He entered the Carmelite order in early 1463 and, after spending two years as a novice in Ferrara, went on to have a distinguished career within the order, holding the role of vicar general of the Mantuan Congregation six times before becoming the prior general of the entire order in 1513. While Mantovano’s life was spent mainly between Mantua and Bologna, he came to Rome on a number of occasions and was centrally involved in successful reforms to the Carmelite order.² A number of his works – for example, the De calamitatibus temporum (1479) and the Parthenice Mariana (1482) – were focused on religious and moral issues.

Mantovano’s best-known work is the Adolescentia, a collection of ten eclogues, first printed in Mantua in 1498, and so called because (according to the author himself) it was written in his youth (ab illa aetate Adulescentiam vocaveram, ‘I had called it Youth, from that period of my life’).³

As scholars have established,⁴ the 1498 edition of the Adolescentia consists of eight eclogues (poems 1 to 8), originally published as a collection sometime between 1471 and 1476 under the title Suburbanus (‘The Rustic’), and two eclogues (poems 9 and 10) composed later in the 1480s. A date range of 1460 to 1463 can be given for the original composition of the first eight eclogues, which went on to have a gestation period in the 1460s before they were published as the Suburbanus.⁵ What would eventually become eclogues 9 and 10 in the Adolescentia were composed separately: the first was written in the mid-1480s and dedicated to Falcone de’ Sinibaldi, and the second sometime between 1486 and 1488 and dedicated to Bernardo Bembo.⁶ The 1498 edition of the Adolescentia contains a dedicatory letter addressed to Paride Ceresara, in which Mantovano describes why he decided to publish the work. He claims that he encountered a manuscript copy of the original eight eclogues in Bologna in 1497 and wanted to destroy the work as it contained ‘much that was too youthful’ (multa nimis iuvenilia); however, finding that too many copies were already in circulation, he resolved to revise the eclogues and to append the two later eclogues to the original eight. The reliability of the letter’s information is suspect. Mantovano’s account has resonances of the stories of the near-destruction of Virgil’s Aeneid and the revised publication of Ovid’s Amores.⁷ Moreover, it seems too convenient that Mantovano came across a copy of his early pastoral poetry at Bologna in the year 1497: in that year, an early printed edition of Petrarch’s Bucolicum carmen was produced in the same city. Seen in this light, Mantovano’s ‘chance discovery’ of his youthful work is best understood as an attempt to breathe new life into his earlier poetry at a time when there was heightened interest in pastoral poetry.

That the Adolescentia is the product of a creative process spanning over thirty years is reflected in the polyphony, thematic diversity and intertextual activities of the collection. The Adolescentia begins with four poems on the nature of love, culminating in a deeply misogynist portrayal of women in the fourth eclogue. Eclogues 5 and 6 then deal respectively with the greed of rich men and the contrasting ways of the city and the country. From eclogue 7 onwards the collection becomes more focused on religion, with the poet’s involvement in the reform of the Carmelite order and his deep antipathy towards the corruption and decadence within his order and the Church at large prominently foregrounded. While the presence of Virgil’s Eclogues can be felt throughout, there is ‘an earthiness and workaday quality about Mantuan’s shepherds more pervasive and striking than anything found in previous Latin pastoral’.⁸ Conversing fluently with a wide range of ancient and early modern texts – encompassing Ovidian elegies, Juvenal’s Satires, biblical literature, medieval debate poetry, Petrarch’s and Boccaccio’s pastoral poetry, fabliaux and bergerie literature, and the epigrams of Giovanni Gioviano Pontano and Ugolino Verino – the Adolescentia oscillates between Arcadian contemplation, Christian religiosity and rustic realism.⁹ Enlivened by the frequent intrusion of elements extraneous to bucolic texture¹⁰ and underpinned by a dynamic (and often ironic) engagement with literary conventions and moral and religious questions, the Adolescentia resists a narrowly biographical reading.

The immediate and long-lasting popularity of the Adolescentia is attested by the fact that, between 1498 and 1600, the work was reprinted more than 160 times. Mantovano’s Latin gained a reputation for its succinctness and erudition, and the collection quickly established itself as a textbook in schools across Europe.¹¹ Mantovano was praised by Erasmus (see Text 3) as the Christianus Maro (‘Christian Virgil’),¹² and the eclogues were especially popular north of the Alps.¹³ In 1502, just four years after the first printed...