Thursday 1 November 
MARK WALKER, 'Ars Gratia Artis? What is the point of new Latin poetry?'

Why bother with neo-Latin, especially poetry? Isn't it all just second-rate imitation of classical originals anyway? In our modern age, when artistic expression is often regarded as synonymous with innovation, and when even English metrical poetry is often thought of as passé, can a genre that employs a dead language written in rigid verse metres ever have anything new to say? In this talk for the CSNLS, editor of Vates: The Journal of New Latin Poetry, Mark Walker points out a few obstacles that would-be Latin poets are likely to encounter, and then suggests - tentatively - a few possible ways to overcome them.

Thursday 22 November 
JEROEN DE KEYSER (KU Leuven), 'The Poet and the Pope. Francesco Filelfo's common cause with Sixtus IV'

After his election to the Holy See in 1471, Pope Sixtus IV revived the idea of a crusade against Mehmed the Conquerer. The humanist Francesco Filelfo (1398-1481) had by then been aiming at a position at the papal court for many years, and his intense campaign for a crusade against the Turks in the 1470s seems not only a manifestation of a personal obsession, but just as much a way of fashioning himself as an ideal propagandist of the Pope's renewed cause. In my paper I will examine the ups and downs of Filelfo's relationship with Sixtus (the addressee of fifteen of Filelfo's letters), which evolved from all-out courtship over the dedication of an apocryphal pamphlet to accusation of the pontiff as though he were the mastermind behind the Pazzi conspiracy against the Medici.