At 12:21 AM 6/22/99 -0400, you wrote: >I have read that there were many Latin sources in use beyond Ovid and >Virgil, including Latin translations of Greek texts, but I have not heard >of manuals made for verse composition. My impression has been that people >simply read classical authors and imitated their style as they attempted to >master Latin composition, but I am no expert. Erasmus produced school >texts; so did Melanchthon.
This is from Kristian Jensen's essay, "The Humanist Reform of Latin and Latin Teaching," in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, ed. Jill Kraye (Cambridge: CUP, 1996), 63-81 at 74: " Poets had been the most important element in the more advanced level of the medieval education, and they remained fundamental in the humanist schools: Virgil, mainly the _Eclogues_ and _Georgics_, but also the _Aeneid_; Horace's _Odes_; the epics of Statius; Lucan's _Bellum civile_; Juvenal's _Satires_; Ovid's _Metamorphoses_ and _Tristia_; and the tragedies of Seneca. Like their prose counterparts, they were read mainly for their linguistic features. Grammar books contained rules for composing in the classical metres, since poetry was regarded as a skill which could be learned--more difficult than, but in essence no different from, other types of literary production. In 1526 the German humanist and religious reformer Philipp Melanchthon wrote that anyone unable to write poetry was not entitled to hold an opinion in learned matters, nor indeed could such a person be said to be a competent writer of prose. The vast quantity of poems produced by humanists for specific occasions--political events, marriages, births, deaths, the publication of new books--demonstrates that poetry was viewed as a practical accomplishment rather than an inspired art." In other words, most of them got it from a grammar textbook. I'd be very surprised, though, if there weren't some special treatises devoted to the subject as well. Perhaps a Ficino query is in order here. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- David Wilson-Okamura http://geoffreychaucer.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] Chaucer: an annotated guide to online resources ----------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message "unsubscribe mantovano" in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
