Commemorating the Sack of Rome (1527): Antiquity and Authority in Renaissance Poetic Calendars

Abstract

This paper aims to advance scholarly understanding of the intellectual significance of Ovid's Fasti during the European Renaissance by examining a number of early modern poetic calendars modelled on the Ovidian poem. Recent studies of Ovid's Fasti have noted that the poem's propensity to contest the meaning of a particular occasion facilitates a sustained examination of the relationship between the past and present of Rome, through which the poet disrupts the reorganization of the Roman calendar by Augustus. This paper suggests that a similarly politically charged operation underpins a number of Renaissance fasti poems. Using these poems’ remembrance of the Sack of Rome (1527) as a case study, this article argues, firstly, that the genre's commemorative function is mobilized competitively by its early modern authors to reflect on the history and status of Rome, particularly the city's role as the caput mundi since antiquity. Secondly, it will be shown that in the second half of the sixteenth century the genre of calendrical poetry — and Ovid's Fasti in particular — became an important medium through which Renaissance humanists critiqued the nature of power at a time when political and ecclesiastical schisms hardened across Europe.