SCS-78: Medieval and Renaissance Reception

This paper takes as its subject Andrea Alciato’s Rerum Patriae Libri IV (1504-5), a local history of the colony of Mediolanum (Milan) from pre-Roman times up until the joint reign of Valentinius and Valens in 364. Its aim is two-fold. First, I will demonstrate how Alciato refashions ancient historiography to raise the idea, commonly held among early-modern exponents of settler colonialism, that the political history of the Roman Empire could be apprehended through that of its colonies (see e.g. Pelgrom and Weststeijn 2020, Somos 2020).

The 16^th century Venetian poet and cortegiana onesta (high-status courtesan) Veronica Franco adapted ancient and contemporary literary traditions to articulate an outsider’s perspective on men, masculinity, and the relationships between men and women (Rosenthal 1992, Adler 1998, Wojciehowski 2006, Migiel 2016). In Renaissance Italy, many male poets wrote love poetry influenced by or directly imitating Ovid’s, both in Latin and in their vernacular, rooting themselves in Ovid’s tropes, characters, and genres.

This paper provides the first systematic ranking of acrostics in Latin and Neo-Latin literature. The program performing the ranking examines all sequences of characters in a corpus and for each sequence estimates the syllabic similarity to Latin (consider the lorem ipsum placeholder text that is often used in publishing to fill empty space and which, although it is originally derived from Cicero, is nonsensical by design).