Introduction

The Introduction first defines the book’s understanding of “becoming lost” and identifies some Latin words that assist in isolating the motif in Republican verse (error/errare, vagus/vagari, etc.). It then turns to the fragmentary Latin poets before Plautus in whose work the theme occurs, namely, Livius Andronicus and Naevius, to show that one can trace the poetic figuration of becoming lost in the geographical regions of Roman power back to the earliest surviving Latin verse and the earliest moments of Roman overseas expansion. Next, in place of the usual chapter-by-chapter summary, the introduction outlines a series of precedents in Greek myth and literature, as well as in actual lived experience, for the poetic narratives that the individual chapters treat in more detail. Finally, the chapter lays out the modern theoretical assumptions with which the whole book is in dialogue. For the terms “disorientation,” “queerness,” and indeed the phrase “getting lost,” the whole book is indebted above all to Sarah Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. For Ahmed, queerness is an effect of disorientation understood in terms of empire, as empire bears upon the construction of sexuality and other aspects of identity. Ahmed’s work, in turn, draws upon a strain of postcolonial theory that has become important (and contested) within historical, archaeological, and literary Roman-empire studies since the turn of the twenty-first century. The Introduction thus concludes by articulating pertinent connections between Ahmed, postcolonial theory, and the scholarship on Rome.

Trinitarian Hagiography in Late Medieval England: Rewriting St Robert of Knaresborough in Latin Verse

The Order of the Holy Trinity for the Redemption of Captives (or Trinitarian Order) is one of the least studied continental religious groups to have expanded into thirteenth-century England. This article examines shifting notions of Trinitarian redemption in late medieval England through the prism of the order's writing about Yorkshire hermit St Robert of Knaresborough (d. 1218). Against the Weberian theory of the routinization of charisma, it demonstrates that Robert's inspirational sanctity was never bound too rigidly by his Trinitarian hagiographers, who rather co-opted his unstable charisma in distinct yet complementary ways to facilitate institutional reinvention and spiritual flourishing in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Grammar, Prosody, and the Place of Accent in Elizabethan Criticism

The Elizabethan poets and critics realized that the English verse line was neither merely syllabic (like French verse) nor quantitative (like Greek or Latin verse), but, they argued, governed by the regular disposition of accents. What seems obvious to us was not so to them. Accent did not belong to any metrical system known to sixteenth-century humanists; it pertained to the spoken pronunciation of the individual (Greek or Latin) word, and to the teaching of grammar, where it was known as prosody. The chapter outlines the place of accent in ancient and early modern grammatical theory before discussing George Gascoigne’s revolutionary theory of English metrical accent. It then looks at some subsequent developments in thinking about verse and accent in later sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers and consider grammar as a neglected place of criticism.

Albertino Mussato, Epistole metriche Edizione critica, traduzione e commento

The Metric Epistles of Albertino Mussato (1261-1329) are a collection of 20 compositions in Latin verse (of which, 12 in elegiac couplets, 8 in hexameters, for a total of 1,570 verses) composed between 1309 and 1326 and addressed to different recipients. The list of recipients includes friends of the author and representatives of the Paduan political and intellectual élite of the early 14th century such as the judges Rolando da Piazzola, Giovanni da Vigonza and Paolo da Teolo, the notary Zambono d’Andrea and Marsilio Mainardini; masters of grammar and rhetoric such as the Venetian Giovanni Cassio, Bonincontro from Mantua and Guizzardo from Bologna; religious personalities such as the Dominican friars Benedetto and Giovannino da Mantova, respectively lecturer and professor of theology at the Studium Generale of the convent of S. Agostino in Padua; collective recipients, such as the College of Artists and fellow citizens of Padua. After an editio princeps was printed in Venice in 1636 on the basis of a now lost manuscript, a critical edition of the Epistles is published here for the first time, including the complete corpus of the texts in the light of their entire manuscript tradition. The texts are accompanied by an Italian translation and a detailed commentary, which mainly aims to bring to light and analyse the dense intertextuality of Mussato’s poem (in particular classical Latin sources), reconsidering the cultural background of the author and his contemporaries in the context of the so-called ‘Paduan prehumanism’ and an ideal dialogue with Dante’s coeval biographical and literary experiences.

Grammar in verse: Latin pedagogy in seventeenth-century England

Latin was the medium as well as the main subject of all early modern education across Europe, in both Protestant and Catholic countries. This chapter examines the surprisingly widespread use of Latin verse (rather than prose) for pedagogical and memnonic purposes from the very earliest stages of education, focused on the role of Latin grammatical verse for the teaching of Latin, but discussing also the related phenomena of Latin verse grammars of Greek and Hebrew, and the reflections of this early educational experience in popular Latin poetry of the period. It argues that the use of grammatical Latin verse was both mnemonically effective and also served to establish from the earliest stages of education the moral and cultural authority and importance of Latin verse as a whole.

Moderns of the Past, Moderns of the Future

This chapter complements the volume’s focus on Celtic–Classical interactions within the notion of Britishness by examining the role of such a dialogue in Ireland’s attempts to extricate itself from the British Empire, and by emphasizing the part that Irish scholars and poets have played in shaping Celtic, Roman, and British identities. It focuses on the Revivalist translator and neurologist, George Sigerson (1836–1925), whose comparative reading of ‘Celtic’ and Latin poetry set out to prove an Irish influence on Latin verse, on the one hand by arguing that Cicero was directly influenced in his poetry by a Celtic druid, and on the other by proving that the author of the first Latin biblical epic of Late Antiquity was Irish. The chapter examines these arguments for the forgotten Celticization of Rome in the light of colonial mimicry, before asking how Sigerson put his theories of the postcolonial power of cross-linguistic influence into practice in his own translation strategy. It concludes by highlighting the lasting implications of Sigerson’s call for a new way of reading texts across languages, attuned to verbal and stylistic echoes and so able to dismantle any strict divide between the Celtic and the Classical.