skip to content
 

2012 Lent Term Seminars

Please note the different venues at Clare College.  Click here for a plan of the College

Thursday 16 February at 5.30pm in the Garden Room, Gillespie Centre
ROUND-TABLE DISCUSSION: 'Neo-Latin Diction and Issues of Translation'

Thursday 23 February at 5.30pm, Old Combination Room, St Catharine's College
GEORGE GOMORI (Cambridge), 'The Polish Swan Triumphant: Sarbiewski's Reception in 17th c. England'

Thursday 8 March at 5.30pm in the Godwin Room, D staircase, Old Court 
HARRY STEVENSON (Cambridge), 'Redefining the Epigram in Renaissance France: The Case of Gilbert Ducher's Epigrammaton libri duo'

The epigram was enormously popular in the first half of sixteenth-century France, particularly among neo-Latin writers. How is this to be understood? I explore, via the 1538 Epigrammaton libri duo of the Lyon-based poet Gilbert Ducher, the idea that this popularity was a product of the way the epigram allowed writers to compose poems that read as if composed by a specific individual. I also look at how this invites the notion that Renaissance writers understood their epigrams as belonging to the genre of the epigram, but did so on the basis of a conception of the genre that was strikingly non-classical; the epigram of the Renaissance was not the epigram of antiquity.