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Victoria Moul's groundbreaking study uncovers one of the most important features of early modern English poetry: its bilingualism. The first guide to a forgotten literary landscape, this book considers the vast quantities of poetry that were written and read in both Latin and English from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Introducing readers to a host of new authors and drawing on hundreds of manuscript as well as print sources, it also reinterprets a series of landmarks in English poetry within a bilingual literary context. Ranging from Tottel's miscellany to the hymns of Isaac Watts, via Shakespeare, Jonson, Herbert, Marvell, Milton and Cowley, this revelatory survey shows how the forms and fashions of contemporary Latin verse informed key developments in English poetry. As the complex, highly creative interactions between the two languages are revealed, the work reshapes our understanding of what 'English' literary history means.
List of contents
Introduction; Shorter verse: 1. Anglo-Latin 'Moralising Lyric' in Early Modern England; 2. Metrical variety and the development of Latin lyric poetry in the latter sixteenth century; 3. Buchanan, Beza and the genre of the Sidney Psalter; 4. Formal panegyric lyric in England, 1550-1650; 5. Abraham Cowley and formal innovation: verse sequences, inset lyrics, Pindarics and free verse; 6. Religious and devotional epigram and lyric; 7. Epigram culture and literary bilingualism in early modern England; 8. Satire, invective and humourous verse; Longer verse: 9. Panegyric Epic in Early Modern England; 10. Latin style and late Elizabethan poetry: rethinking epylli; 11. Palingenian epic: allegory, ambition, and didacticism; Afterword.
About the author
Victoria Moul is Associate Professor in Early Modern Latin and English at University College London and is a leading expert on the relationship between Latin and English poetry. She is the author of Jonson, Horace and the Classical Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and the editor of the Cambridge Guide to Neo-Latin Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2017). She has published widely on classical, early modern and modernist poetry alike.
Summary
Painting the fullest picture to date of early modern England's bilingual poetic culture, this study contextualises landmark texts ranging from Tottel's miscellany to the hymns of Isaac Watts, via Shakespeare, Jonson, Herbert, Marvell, Milton and Cowley. This account is invaluable for both scholars of early modern English poetry and classicists.
