On its website, Brill summarizes the aims of the series to which Paul White’s volume contributes as follows: “This strand of Brill Research Perspectives addresses important themes connected with the reworking of material inherited from classical antiquity, primarily the Latin language and Latin writing conventions, … These surveys are designed to give advanced students and scholars new to this particular area an idea of the sources, approaches and existing research, sketching scholarly history and facilitating further work.”
White’s book opens with an abstract, a list of keywords (love poetry – Neo-Latin – elegy – lyric – epigram – Petrarchism) and a brief introductory section, in which he points out that an overview of all Latin love poetry written in the early modern world would be impossible, since love themes are present in nearly every genre and form of both classical and early modern poetry, and “Most humanists of the Renaissance wrote love poetry of one sort or another” (2). White therefore narrows the scope of his survey to include primarily Latin love poetry collections, assuring readers that “From that perspective, we are in a position to identify the main trends and features of such collections, and the genres in which Neo-Latin authors wrote them” (4). He is also at pains to remind his readers that while the organization of his study, in its emphasis on the early modern Latin love poets’ engagement with classical genres and imitatio of specific classical and non-classical poets (including especially, but not exclusively, Petrarch), reflects both the primary manner in which Neo-Latin love poetry defined itself and the major tendencies in modern criticism of this poetry, readers should nonetheless keep in mind that early modern love poets did not always strictly observe generic and metrical boundaries (which can, of course, be said of their classical models as well) and that they often adapted their Latin and vernacular models for their own distinct purposes.
The introduction is followed by thirteen short sections. Eight of these has as its primary focus the Neo-Latin love poets’ engagement with specific earlier genres or authors: 1. “Love Elegy” (5-20); 2. “Neo-Catullanism” (20-26); 4. “Petrarchism” (32-39); 5. “Mediaeval Presences” (38-40); 6. “Virgilian Pastoral and Horatian Lyric” (41-48); 7. “Greek Models” (48-54); 9. “Philosophical and Spiritual Currents”, subdivided into 9.1 Biblical Themes (63-66), 9.2 Neo-Platonism (66-72), and 9.3 Lucretius (72-74); 13. “Love’s Transformations; Metamorphosis and Mannerism” (93-101), in which White makes an exception to the book’s exclusion of epic to discuss the unusually powerful influence of Ovid’s Metamorphoses on Neo-Latin poetry, due especially to the poem’s emphasis on erotic transformations.
Section 3, titled “Excursus: Art and Life” (27-32), discusses the disproportionate representation of biographical approaches to Neo-Latin love poetry in its scholarly history. Here, White usefully points out (quoting the famous passage from Apuleius’s Apologia 10) that while such readings can be viewed as an inheritance from the early modern poets’ classical models (and their critics), there are also new problems introduced because “many Neo-Latin poets more or less explicitly identified the pseudonymous puellae whom they addressed in their poetry with real women” (27), in this case readily identifiable women, including their own wives or, for social as well as literary purposes, women of noble families. Problems also arose when poets (and here Théodore de Bèze serves as White’s primary example), to preserve their reputations, especially for religious reasons (in Bèze’s case, a conversion to Calvinism), desired either to disown their erotic poems as juvenilia or to insist on their fictionality, or both (29-31). Two later sections, 11. Obscenity (81-89) and 12. Homosexuality (89-93), while focused more explicitly on sexual language and content, also have at their center the poets’ concerns with the distinction (or at times an insistent identification) between their biographical lives and what is expressed in their verses.
In Section 8, “Women’s Writing and Female Voices” (54-63), White notes that female Neo-Latin poets wrote primarily on political or religious themes, while most love poetry by women in the early modern period was written in the vernacular; he offers as examples Italian love poets, whose model was Petrarch. Latin poems by women did include epithalamia and funerary laments, in which love themes often feature. Latin love poetry, as well as religious poems (Heroides sacrae) purporting to offer the female first-person perspective, were produced by men, modelled on Ovid’s Heroides. Especially interesting in this section is White’s discussion of Caterina Borghini, at least certain of whose elegies he convincingly suggests were modelled on the Sulpicia poems (59-61).
As White notes at the start of Section 10, “Conjugal Love and Family” (74-81), while married love was, for Greek and Roman poets, primarily restricted to epithalamia, with only occasional exceptions, such as Propertius Book 4 (4.3 and 4.11), or Ovid’s Heroides and Tristia, the theme of conjugal love is prominent in Neo-Latin love poetry, where entire books and collections of poetry are devoted it. This occurred, as White points out, in part because “views of the role and function of marriage in Greco-Roman societies differed in fundamental ways from the conception of it in Christian thought” (74). The Neo-Latin poets also recognized an opportunity for originality: “the theme of conjugal love, given the absence of ancient models for first-person love poems about marriage, offered Neo-Latin poets new possibilities for innovation in the composition of thematically unified love poetry collections.” Giovanni Pontano’s elegiac collection De amore coniugali serves as a central example. Pontano reshaped Roman love elegy’s tropes to suit the context of a loving marriage, including the love of parents for their children. White rightly states that the sequence of naeniae (lullabies) that conclude De amore coniugali Book 2 “merit inclusion in the discussion, since Pontano is consciously adapting the language and idioms of elegiac and Catullan love poetry to the expression of parental affection” (78). The section ends with a reminder that the Neo-Latin poets themselves (including, as seen in Section 8, female poets) also regularly produced epithalamia, modelled especially on the hymns of Catullus, Statius, and Claudian (80-81).
In the Conclusion (101-103), White quickly surveys recent trends in scholarship on Neo-Latin love poetry (some of which are mentioned also in the book’s introductory pages and at relevant points in the book’s individual sections), especially praising and encouraging the continued production of new critical editions, print and digital, as work “that provides the foundation and impetus for further research” (101). His conclusion expresses optimism that “As more editions become available and more studies of individual works are published, there is increasing potential for more broad-based studies taking up both synchronic and diachronic perspectives.” (103).
The book’s bibliography is usefully divided into two groups: “Primary,” which first lists relevant I Tatti Renaissance Library Series volumes, then Other Modern Editions, and finally Early Modern Editions; and “Secondary,” scholarly articles and books. There is also a helpful Index Nominum.
While much can be learned from this book, several aspects will, I expect, prove at times frustrating to scholarly readers and could limit the book’s usefulness for students. It is welcome that White offers, in each section, quotations from or summaries of the works of several representative poets to illustrate the various ways Neo-Latin poets employed and reworked their sources; readers will eventually encounter the names of more than one hundred different early modern authors and works, primarily poets but also prose writers. One receives the impression, however, that the book’s individual sections were written independently, then put together in their present order without sufficient attention to editing, with the result that some writers are mentioned more than once before receiving even a cursory introduction (e.g. Mantuan, mentioned on 23 and 31, full name and dates given on 41, described as “the Carmelite poet” on 84). Also, whereas White does a good job of alerting readers that Neo-Latin love poets often simultaneously employ several different models, both classical and later (e.g. Petrarch), he could usefully inform them, in the introduction, that they should therefore expect to encounter several of the same poets, and even some of the same examples, in different sections.
Although White emphasizes, including in the book’s opening abstract, that Neo-Latin love poetry “had a transnational dimension, but also needs to be situated within local and national context” (1), the nationalities of individual writers are not regularly noted and are rarely emphasized as meaningful. For instance, just after acknowledging that 15th-c. Italian Neo-Latin love elegists have received more scholarly attention than those “beyond the Alps in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,” White names Johannes Secundus and Petrus Lotichius Secundus as “the two non-Italian elegists best served by the scholarship” (13) but does not mention their respective Dutch and German origins.
While White’s discussions of ancient genres and poets are necessarily brief, Classicists, whether scholars or advanced students, will likely find his treatments of themes such as servitium amoris and militia amoris, or the recusatio, oversimplified or even reductive (with limited, or in the case of the exclusus amator [19], no bibliographical references), which could make these readers more skeptical of White’s evaluations of poets and works with which they are unfamiliar.
The inconsistent use, or at times omission, of references can also prove irksome. I offer one of numerous possible examples. In his discussion of the Neo-Latin elegists’ appropriation of the militia amoris theme, White partially paraphrases passages from Janus Dousa’s Cupidines 1.1 and 1.3 and claims that Dousa “extends the conventional metaphors, images and themes of love elegy as far as they will go.” Readers who are compelled by White’s strong language to read and evaluate the poems for themselves will be disappointed to find no footnote directing them to the source. (19) (The poems can be found on pp. 515-517 and 519 of Dousa 1609, included in White’s bibliography).
It is a testament to the increased interest in, and access to, Neo-Latin literature, including poetry, that an overview such as White’s is not as much needed today as it might have been even five years ago. The I Tatti Renaissance Library continues to publish new volumes regularly, several devoted to poetry, and the Bloomsbury Neo-Latin Series offers anthologies and texts with translations and commentaries, as well as studies devoted to various aspects of Neo-Latin literature and culture. Even so, readers will still find much that is useful in this book, as well as in the other volumes of the Brill series to which it contributes.