CLASSICS 33

TLS JANUARY 19 2018

to stimulate and entertain than if we read themwith the parti pris that they are slavishly imita-tive. A poetics of novelty certainly informsNeo-Latin literature on novel subjects, such asthe epics in Latin on the New World voyages ofColumbus, or Jesuit didactic poems of theEnlightenment on scientific subjects, such asGiuseppe Mazzolari’s six books on electricity(Electricorum libri vi, 1767).

Classical scholars, however, are prone to anhour-glass model of intertextuality that focuseson the relationship of Neo-Latin to ancient texts, ignoring what lies between. Often there isa layering of intertextuality, whereby the ancient model is filtered through intervening, post-classical, texts. Classicists are charmed byJonson’s imitations, in the vernacular, of Catul-lus’ poems 5 and 7, The Forest 5 (“Come, my Celia, let us prove, / While we may, the sports oflove”) and 6 (“Kiss me, sweet: the wary lover /Can your favours keep and cover”). But, as Vic-toria Moul points out, Jonson’s songs comefreighted with the intervening Catullanism of “countless brief Latin lyrics [in the manner of Janus Secundus] . . . which number kisses orlament the death of pert and eroticized birds”, hackneyed poems whose frequently explicit eroticism hints at the true interest in Celia on the

part of Jonson’s Volpone, for whose mouth thesongs were first composed.

Neo-Latin texts draw on earlier texts in bothLatin (classical, Neo-, and even medieval)and the vernaculars. The wildly successful fif-teenth-century novella De duobus amantibus historia (“The tale of two lovers”) by Enea Sil-vio Piccolomini, the future Pope Pius II, has a plot similar to stories in Boccaccio’s Decam-eron, but is also full of allusions to classical Latin authors. Many Neo-Latin writers, from Petrarch onwards, were productive in both Latin and the vernacular. Milton’s 1645 Poemsis divided into separate sections in English andLatin. Ludvig Holberg, the founder of Danishand Norwegian literature, wrote the much-translated Nicolai Klimii iter subterraneum (“Niels Klim’s Underground Travels”, 1741), aNeo-Latin Gulliver’s Travels that anticipates Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth; Holberg’s Latin novel gave an importantboost to the infant genre of Danish and Norwe-gian fiction. Some authors produced English and Latin versions of the same poems, testing the different resources of the two languages andof their intertextual traditions: Marvell wrote Latin versions of “On a drop of dew”(Ros) and“The garden” (Hortus). The conviction of many

Neo-Latin writers that what they produced inLatin was as valuable as their vernacular outputdeserves the modern reader’s respect. Neo-Latin literature is too important to be left to theNeo-Latinists.

It should rather be seen as an integral part ofan early modern literary culture that operatesin two (or more) languages, a culture that issignificantly shaped by traffic in both direc-tions between Latin and the vernaculars. Weare reminded that this is part of a longer historyby Richard Ashdowne and Carolinne White’sLatin in Medieval Britain, a collection basedon a 2013 conference that marked the comple-tion, after exactly a hundred years, of one ofOxford’s great dictionary projects, the Dic-tionary of Medieval Latin from BritishSources. One of the sections in the volumefocuses on the complex relationships betweenLatin, English and Anglo-Norman in medievalBritain. For example, Laura Wright shows thatcode-switching between the three languages isroutine in the late-medieval Latin accounts ofSt Paul’s Cathedral. Latin lexicography mayparadoxically contribute to the history of theEnglish language: thus “plough-clout” (“aniron plate nailed to the frame of a plough to pre-vent wear”) is first attested for 1350–51 in the

OED, but an occurrence in DMLBS of theLatin ploucloutum from 1307 gives an indirectantedating of some decades for the Englishword from which the Latin is borrowed.

The chapters in the first section of the vol-ume track the history of Latin in Britain fromthe sixth-century Gildas to the eve of theReformation, when, Robert Swanson argues,it was still true that “Latin . . . was almost asmuch an English language as English itself”.Neil Wright reminds us that there were classi-cizing renaissances before the Renaissance, ina chapter on the twelfth-century Anglo-Latinhistories of English kings and bishops by Will-iam of Malmesbury, and the epic poem on theTrojan War by Joseph of Exeter. Joseph’s Bel-lum Troianum (late 1180s) is nearly contem-porary with another medieval Latin epic on aclassical subject, Walter of Châtillon’s Alex-andreis, on Alexander the Great, a poem thatbecame a standard school text, remained inprint from the late fifteenth to the eighteenthcenturies, and nourished the early modernvogue for classicizing epic, as Paul Gwynnepoints out in A Guide to Neo-Latin Literature.A final caution to look for continuity, as wellas discontinuity, between medieval Latin andNeo-Latin.

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