Neo-Latin in a Global Context: Current Approaches

In this paper I will offer a formal analysis of several of Jacopo Sannazaro’s Piscatoriae Eclogae, concentrating on the features of the eclogues’ poetic seascape. My aim is to grasp the significance of Sannazaro’s transposition of pastoral from land to sea, beyond the apparent drive of Neo-Latin authors to “outdo” classical authors “by introducing new uses and forms of literary genres” (Grant 117). Not only is Sannazaro’s pastoral seascape integral to his poetic content in a way that transcends mere novelty, but it also disrupts normal pastoral convention.

This talk will discuss how Girolamo Fracastoro, in his poem Syphilidis, sive Morbi Gallici, brilliantly reimagined the tree transformations from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to showcase the impact of syphilis on the human body and psyche. Ovid was an ubiquitous presence during the Renaissance (Burrow; Moss), and Fracastoro’s familiarity with Ovid has not escaped some notice of scholars (Eatough, 1984). This previous scholarship on Fracastoro’s use of classical texts in his poem, however, has only skated across Fracastoro’s nuanced engagement with Ovid.

Cristoforo Landino (1424–1498), though best known as a philosopher and a scholar of Dante and Vergil, wrote several dozen Latin poems, published under the title Xandra. Most of these poems are in elegiac couplets, but two are in phalacean hendecasyllables and four are in sapphic stanzas; all of these are in the first of the three books. Landino chooses the phalacean meter in imitation of Catullus, as is well known (Gaisser p. 216, Chatfield p.

Known widely throughout the seventeenth century as the ‘miracle of her sex,’ and ‘the Dutch Minerva,’ Anna Maria van Schurman (1607-1678) challenged her male-dominated world by existing within it. She was the first woman to attend University in the Netherlands, though she remained hidden behind the lattice window of a confessional—so she wouldn’t “distract” the men (van Beek, 2010). She penned a Dissertatio which argued that women should be educated exactly as men were, though it met with fierce opposition from her intellectual sponsors and mentors.