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2015 Michaelmas Term Seminars

Thursday 27th October
Dick Sacré (Leuven), 'The Great War and Neo-Latin Literature'

This talk will be about an almost entirely forgotten part of Neo-Latin literature. It will survey Latin writings dealing with the Great War, prose and poetry, published and unpublished works, written either during or after the war. The focus will be on Latin poetry written in England, Germany and Italy. Attention will be paid to some characteristics of the Latin poetry of the time, and some examples will be analysed in detail.

Thursday 24th November
Anna-Maria Hartmann (Christ Church, Oxford), 'Knowing the Gods in Sixteenth-Century Europe: A History of Neo-Latin Mythography from 1500-1567'

A central aspect of Renaissance culture was its fascination with the ancient gods. A sixteenth-century reader interested in the pagan pantheon would often turn to reference works written expressly on this subject: mythographies. In this paper, I offer a revised account of the history of this extremely popular Neo-Latin genre in Europe 1500-1567, supplementing and correcting the hitherto standard narrative by Jean Seznec. At two points along the journey, I will take the opportunity to linger over fascinating aspects of the genre’s sixteenth-century history. First, I will examine the composition of Georg Pictorius’s Theologia mythologica (1532) in order to show the central importance of other humanist genres in the reconstitution of mythography in the sixteenth century. Second, I will suggest a solution for a vexing problem posed by a set of word-image relationships in Pictorius’s second mythography, which I hope will be as entertaining for my audience as Pictorius (I argue) had intended it to be for his own learned readers.