The reception of Italian neo-Latin poetry in English manuscript sources, c. 1550-1720:
literature, morality, and anti-PoperyThis essay presents some preliminary findings of a new and extensive survey of neo-Latin verse in surviving manuscript sources dating from between c. 1550 and 1720 and currently conserved in English libraries and archives. 1 The piece provides a first comprehensive, if provisional, overview of the presence of Italian neo-Latin poetry in this manuscript corpus, thus complementing existing studies of the reception of Italian Renaissance humanism in early modern England. Work on this topic has tended to converge on Shakespeare and other major English authors, and to focus both on the reception of literature in Italian (rather in Latin) and on print rather than manuscript material. 2 By contrast, this essay sets out the evidence for the reception of Italian neo-Latin poetry in mid-sixteenth-to early eighteenthcentury English literary culture deriving from an analysis of common types of early modern manuscripts, such as private commonplace books and personal miscellanies. 3
Much has been written about Lucan's presence in Dante's works, especially in the Divina Commedia. The vernacular Dante is, indeed, the medieval author whose reception of the Bellum civile has been investigated the most thoroughly. 1 Between the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, scholars such as Moore, Belloni, Proto, and Ussani produced a series of detailed surveys on the topic; 2 from the 1960s onwards, Paratore, Marsili, and others developed this basis, highlighting that Dante's imitation of Lucan's poem involves structural affinities that go beyond formal reverberations. 3 Many later scholarly works focus on Dante's treatment of Caesar and Cato, who in the Commedia are described in keeping with Lucan's text. 4 Similarly 1 For a bibliographic overview, in addition to the texts cited below,
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.