The reception of Italian neo-Latin poetry in English manuscript sources, c.1550-1720: literature, morality, and anti-popery

Abstract

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