A Literary History of Latin & English Poetry: Bilingual Verse Culture in Early Modern England

Description

Victoria Moul's groundbreaking study uncovers one of the most important features of early modern English poetry: its bilingualism. The first guide to a forgotten literary landscape, this book considers the vast quantities of poetry that were written and read in both Latin and English from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Introducing readers to a host of new authors and drawing on hundreds of manuscript as well as print sources, it also reinterprets a series of landmarks in English poetry within a bilingual literary context. Ranging from Tottel's miscellany to the hymns of Isaac Watts, via Shakespeare, Jonson, Herbert, Marvell, Milton and Cowley, this revelatory survey shows how the forms and fashions of contemporary Latin verse informed key developments in English poetry. As the complex, highly creative interactions between the two languages are revealed, the work reshapes our understanding of what 'English' literary history means.

Victoria Moul is Associate Professor in Early Modern Latin and English at University College London and is a leading expert on the relationship between Latin and English poetry. She is the author of Jonson, Horace and the Classical Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and the editor of the Cambridge Guide to Neo-Latin Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2017). She has published widely on classical, early modern and modernist poetry alike.

'Here are poems that time has forgotten, even whole authors who have slipped out of view. Victoria Moul is an ideal guide to this world of lost literature: erudite, obviously, but also radiant with wonder. She writes with undisguised relish and her translations make you want to read more.' David Wilson-Okamura, East Carolina University