Thursday 23rd January
ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION: Translating Neo-Latin Texts

Discussion will focus on sections of Milton's /Epitaphium Damonis/ (David Money), Poliziano's 'Praefatio' (Jaspreet Singh Boparai) to his /Manto/, and J. C. Scaliger's /Poetices/ (Nick Hardy).

Thursday 20th February.
ALEX WONG (Cambridge), 'The Poetry of Kissing'

The Basia of Janus Secundus have retained a modest celebrity. Less well known are the poets who followed his lead, including, pre-eminently, Jean Bonnefons, Janus Dousa the Elder and Janus Lernutius, all of whom wrote collections of Basia. My work proceeds from the premise that the basium - a tradition of humanist kiss-lyric - may be regarded as a generic whole, with a poetics of its own, although in some respects shared with various contingent forms and widely diffused. In attempting a concise overview of the Neo-Catullan 'basium' and its development, this paper will touch briefly upon some of the manifestations of what I consider to be the genre's recurrent, animating tensions and ironies. These relate to the ambiguous portrayal both of masculine sexuality, and of the erotic status and euphemistic potential of the act of kissing. The result of these ambiguities is a playful contention of poetic registers. Such tensions helped to sustain and propagate this peculiar genre, as well as the half-parodies or outright travesties written by those sceptical of it. The paper will finally offer some examples of the ways in which the basium tradition enjoyed a continued life in English vernacular literature of the early modern period. English kiss-lyrics are less obviously 'generic', since no English author wrote a full set of 'Basia'; but they are still deliberately and self-consciously conventional, and sometimes rather sophisticated.

TUESDAY 4th March.
DAVID McOMISH (Glasgow), 'Iuniperi gravis umbra: Virgil as Moderator of the Nation in the Pages of the Delitiae Poetarum Scotorum'

This talk presents some of the latest research from the AHRC/University of Glasgow project on the Delitiae Poetarum Scotorum, the largest anthology of neo-Latin poetry by Scottish writers. It will examine how key aspects of Virgil's poetry were studiously and advisedly adopted and adapted in the DPS to express and propound a particular view of post-reformation Scottish civic society. The discussion will focus on the work of Andrew Melville, Hercules Rollock, and Adam King (the poetry of these three poets represents over half the collection the project team will translate and critically assess), and will focus on two ways in which Virgil's work was utilised. Firstly there will be an examination of the ways in which Andrew Melville appropriates Virgil's evolving concept of the 'umbra' across the Eclogues, Georgics, and the Aeneid, in order to present a vision of a divinely-sanctioned, civilisation-creating work ethic. This will be followed by a consideration of the significance of Melville's employment of Virgilian genre-specific formats to propound both this view and other aspects of his Calvinist beliefs. Rollock and King will provide further evidence of the literary and thematic trends witnessed in Melville. Through them we have the opportunity to see a dialectical counterpoint to Melville's Virgil-inspired ideology that both underlines the nascent influence of Melville's thought, and reveals a plurality of potentially antithetical views existing outside of the confines of an increasingly dominant Presbyterian culture in Jacobean Scotland.