The literary culture of early modern England was bilingual; literature of all kinds, including poetry which is the focus of this book, was read and written in both English and Latin throughout the whole of the period that we call Renaissance or early modern.Footnote ¹ Both the overlap and the lack of overlap between Latin and English poetry makes a difference to our understanding of this literary culture. It matters that so many apparently innovative moves in English poetics – including the fashion for epyllia, epigrams and Cowley’s ‘irregular’ Pindaric odes – can be traced back to continental Latin poetry: that is, to ‘neo-’ Latin rather than primarily classical verse. It is important that so many popular poems circulated bilingually, in both Latin and English versions, or with answers or ripostes in the other language. But it also matters that there are some forms – such as sonnets in English and (until Marvell’s ‘First Anniversary’) short panegyric epic in Latin – that were a characteristic feature of verse in one language but not the other.

The quantity of neo-Latin poetry in surviving manuscript and print sources from early modern England is vast, and to a large extent still unmapped and unexplored.Footnote ² Most first-line indexes of poetry do not include any Latin.Footnote ³ Indeed, the vast majority of scholarship on the (English) poetry of this period is written as if contemporary Latin poetry simply did not exist.Footnote ⁴ This book outlines some of the ways in which developments in Latin poetry were related to – both influencing and influenced by – the landmarks of English poetry with which scholars, students and lovers of English literature are familiar. In so doing, it attempts to chart some of the vast and largely unknown field of Latin poetry that was read and written in early modern England between around 1550 and 1700 in a way that is both accessible and, I hope, engaging to readers who have no Latin themselves: to convey something of the particular pleasures and expectations of this poetry, of how it works, what it is like to read, and how and why it was enjoyed. But I aim also to demonstrate how English verse culture as a whole looks, feels, sounds and makes sense differently if we stop pretending that all that Latin is not there.

Landmark works and authors recontexualised by this ‘bilingual’ approach include Tottel’s Songs and Sonnets (Chapter 1); the Elizabethan interest in quantitative metrics (Chapters 2 and 3); the Sidney psalter (Chapter 3); the so-called ‘Ovidian’ epyllia of the 1590s (Chapter 10); Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode’ (Chapter 4); his ‘First Anniversary’ and Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis (Chapter 9); Jonson’s and Cowley’s experiments in Pindaric lyric (Chapter 5); the unclassical tradition of didactic and allegorical epic (Chapter 11), including Fletcher’s Purple Island; Herbert’s Temple and the development of religious lyric through to the hymns of Isaac Watts (Chapters 3 and 6); Jonson’s Epigrams (Chapter 7); and the conception and practice of satiric, humorous and invective verse (Chapter 8).

Other surprises relate to the lack of obvious contact: there are no sonnets in Latin, and no ‘standard’ way of translating a sonnet in Latin emerges at any stage; conversely, the extraordinary popularity of Latin ‘free verse’ and ‘literary inscriptions’ in the later seventeenth century, though connected to the increasingly ‘free’ Pindarics produced in the latter part of that period in English, has no direct English analogue (Chapter 5). It is hard to imagine any serious English poem attempting, as David Kinloch’s De hominis procreatione does, a detailed description not only of sexual intercourse but also of all the various ways in which sex may fail to lead to conception, a rather startling literalization of the frustrated erotics of the Elizabethan epyllion to which Kinloch’s poem is closely related in style (Chapter 10); or, as in the second book of Cowley’s Plantarum Libri Sex (dating from c.1660), to stage a debate between personified herbs on the causes of female menstruation and the ethics of abortion (Chapter 11).

Such an approach is not intended to denigrate the poetry of the sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth century written in English. On the contrary, I consider the period stretching from Spenser to Pope to be uncontroversially the most brilliant 150 years of English poetic history. This is poetry that I love and know well and have been reading since childhood. But it is also poetry which arises from, draws upon and feeds back into a wider literary culture that was intensely bilingual: it is not just that enormous quantities of Latin verse were both read and written, often by the same poets whose English verse we still read and teach, but that the Latin and the vernacular poetry are in constant conversation. The book arises from a strong desire to understand better where that English poetry comes from as much as it does from my enthusiasm for the Latin poetry of the period.

Education and Readership

Educated early modern men (and some women) wrote, read and circulated Latin verse intensively because they had been trained to do so: Latin was central to both secondary and tertiary education not only because Latin literature was the main subject of study at school (though this is certainly true), but also because Latin was the medium of education. Boys and young men at grammar school and university – in modern terms, from upper-primary to the end of secondary school age – were educated in Latin.Footnote ⁵ There are obvious parallels with the use of ‘world’ languages (such as English or French) in secondary and tertiary education today in many parts of the world where they are not a mother tongue.

Latin literary dexterity – including multiple modes of transformation between languages and forms, such as the rendering of themes in both prose and verse, or recasting an hexameter extract into a lyric, as well as translation into English and back into Latin (so-called ‘double translation’) – was central to educational success.Footnote ⁶ While there is little evidence that schoolboys were regularly asked to compose English poetry as such, especially before the mid-seventeenth century, there is no question that anyone who had completed secondary education (regardless of university experience) had been required not only to read but also to compose a considerable quantity of Latin verse.Footnote ⁷ The small proportion of girls who were educated were probably instructed in similar ways to boys, though perhaps with a lesser emphasis upon active oral and written skills as opposed to passive comprehension.Footnote ⁸

Due to the almost exclusive focus upon Latin, early modern schoolboys read a great deal more Latin than even students specialising in the classics do today, and in particular the chronological range of the Latin texts studied was much wider than ours.Footnote ⁹ Too much scholarship on ‘classical reception’ in early modern England has assumed, implicitly or explicitly, that ‘the classics’ of the Renaissance schoolroom were, more or less, those of a good Classics BA degree today. This is a particularly distorting assumption in a British context, since the British ‘Classics’ curriculum has been and to a significant extent remains one of the narrowest in the world. Of course early modern schoolboys read a great deal of Cicero, Livy, Ovid, Virgil and Horace. But this was far from all they read in Latin and in most cases it wasn’t what they read first, either: many children, for instance, read Mantuan’s Christian eclogues, the Adulescentia, before they read the Virgilian original. Mantuan (1447–1516) was a Carmelite monk whose work was popular in the northern European schoolroom because it is easy to construe, highly quotable and excerptable, and conveniently hostile to the papal Curia. Other works known to have been widely read in the late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century classroom include Palingenius’ (fl. c.1530) Zodiacus Vitae (an extraordinary philosophical epic, composed in deceptively straightforward hexameters, discussed in Chapter 11) and the so-called Disticha Catonis (Cato’s Distichs), a late antique work consisting entirely of moralizing epigrams in single hexameter couplets (discussed in Chapter 7). Indeed, two of only a handful of Latin texts that we can be sure Shakespeare knew – because he refers to them in his early work – are Palingenius and Mantuan.Footnote ¹⁰ These are two enormously influential Latin works which most modern Latinists have not even heard of, let alone read.Footnote ¹¹ Extracts of both these poems, alongside some other works commonly read at school, are found very frequently in manuscript commonplace books and personal notebooks, including those of adults as well as schoolboys, suggesting that they were remembered, read and revisited into adult life.Footnote ¹²

What early modern readers and poets meant by and expected from ‘epigram’ and ‘(didactic) epic’ were shaped by works in the tradition of Cato’s Distichs and Palingenius’ Zodiacus Vitae as much as they were by Martial or Lucretius. Whereas a modern classicist associates dactylic hexameter exclusively with medium to long works, such as epic, satire and verse epistle, medieval and early modern readers encountered hexameters initially as the medium of moralizing and mnemonic verse, frequently in single couplets. What difference it makes if we read early modern poetry in these genres with this in mind is explored in Chapters 11 (for didactic epic) and 7 (for epigram).

Mantuan and Palingenius were both writing what would now usually be termed ‘neo-’ (that is, post-medieval) Latin, but early modern schoolboys also often read late antique and early Christian material such as works by Ausonius, Claudian, Prudentius and Augustine (not to mention Cato’s Distichs), which are now rarely read even at university in the Anglophone world. In the commonplace book prepared by the future Charles I as a gift to his father James I, for instance, Claudian is the sixth most frequently excerpted author, with 44 quotations (more than Virgil with 41), and Ausonius the ninth (not far below Virgil, with 27).Footnote ¹³ Finally, there are several works – such as the Satires of Persius or the poetry of Statius and Silius Italicus – which we would recognise as ‘classical’ but which held a more prominent place in early modern education than they do in typical Latin literature survey courses today.

Early modern readers were encouraged to think of the full range of Latin – and indeed Greek, Hebrew and vernacular – literature in relation to one another, as valuable in large part for their consonances and similarities, rather than in terms of their stylistic uniqueness or diverse historical contexts. The pervasive habit of ‘commonplacing’ contributed strongly to this type of reading, since collating material from a variety of texts under the same heading (such as ‘the brevity of life’) tends to reinforce the ways in which works resemble rather than differ from one another. Some surviving commonplace books attest to this very dramatically: one unusually well-filled example, made almost certainly in the mid-1630s, repeatedly juxtaposes the compiler’s favourite classical authors (particularly Horace, Ovid, Juvenal, Pindar, Seneca and Boethius) with modern extracts drawn especially from the Latin drama of George Buchanan (1506–82), the Latin lyric verse of Casimir Sarbiewski (1595–1640) and (in English) Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (first published 1621) and the poetry of Michael Drayton (1563–1631).Footnote ¹⁴

The level of practical Latinity produced by the early modern education system was no doubt variable, but it is obvious from its widespread use even for relatively informal purposes such as letters, diary entries, jokes, comic songs and private prayers, that it was a living language for a large number of people, and at least accessibly comprehensible for many more. This is not least because Latin literacy – like learning an international language today – was the gateway to almost all advanced knowledge, including the learning of other languages. The journal of Bulstrode Whitelocke (1605–75) reports that following his parents’ move to London around 1615, he joined Merchant Taylors’ school aged 11 (having previously been briefly at Eton); that at 13, during a period of heated and violent rivalry between the boys of Merchant Taylors’ and those of St Paul’s, he made a Latin oration on the miseries of Civil War and the benefits of peace; and that in 1619, aged probably still only 14, he went up to St John’s College, Oxford, already excellent in Latin and Greek and well versed in Hebrew.Footnote ¹⁵ Grammars and elementary texts in both Greek and Hebrew at this period were in Latin. Similarly, when Bartholus Herland, a Danish Latin poet, moved to London in the early 1660s, his notebook records his study of English grammar, with a particular focus upon English strong verbs. Even though the English verbal system is linguistically close to that of Danish, and certainly much more so than to Latin, all of Herland’s notes on English grammar and even his glosses of English vocabulary are in Latin, not in Danish.Footnote ¹⁶ As Hans Helander has put it: ‘Up to the eighteenth century, educated people learnt nearly everything they knew by means of literature written in Latin.’Footnote ¹⁷ Ann Moss has written of Latin in this period as a ‘verbal environment in which to live’: no-one’s mother tongue, but not what we mean today by a ‘dead’ language either.Footnote ¹⁸

Given the intense Latinity of educational and professional institutions, and the status of Latin as the international language of scholarship and science, it is unsurprising that a large number of Latin books were published in Britain throughout early modernity.Footnote ¹⁹ But the great majority of Latin works available in England had not been printed there: whereas almost all works in English were printed in Britain (and are therefore recorded in the ESTC), most modern Latin works by authors elsewhere in Europe, as well as a fair number by British authors – that is, the great majority of neo-Latin works overall – were read in England in imported continental editions.Footnote ²⁰ Even where particularly popular continental Latin works were eventually printed in England, the date of those English printings is often misleading. Hils’ 1646 selection of the Polish poet Casimir Sarbiewski’s (1595–1640) Latin verse, with facing translation, for instance, and the 1657 London edition of Angelin Gazet’s (1568–1653) comic verse collection, Pia Hilaria, both significantly post-date the increase in the popularity of those works: that is, they are a response to market demand, and reflect an existing readership relying initially on continental editions.Footnote ²¹

For this reason, surviving library lists and booksellers’ catalogues, as well as careful analysis of commonplace books, manuscript miscellanies and patterns of allusion and reference, are better guides to the modern Latin works that were read than the ESTC. From such data, the cultural importance of certain works of recent or contemporary Latin become clear: even small or largely non-literary libraries in the early seventeenth century, for instance, typically included a copy of the Latin psalm paraphrases of George Buchanan (1506–82), sometimes bound with those of the French Calvinist Théodore de Bèze (1519–1605); the epigrams of John Owen (c.1564–c.1622); and, very often, one or both of the Latin novels of the Franco-Scot John Barclay (1582–1621).Footnote ²² These three works are without doubt among the most widely read works of contemporary literature in Jacobean England, and not only in England: they are also the works that would be cited by any educated contemporary elsewhere in Europe if you asked them to name a famous British author.

Buchanan, Owen and Barclay are figures who have dropped almost completely out of English literary history, although without them major English literary developments – including, for instance, Jonson’s Epigrams (1616); the tradition of English hymnody (an early eighteenth-century development deriving in large part from psalm paraphrase); and the English novel – would have developed quite differently, if at all. We may notice that, with their inclusion, British literary history looks strikingly more European than we are used to, and less centred either on England or on London: Buchanan and Barclay are Scots, though Barclay was educated by Jesuits in France and was culturally French, and Buchanan spent time in France, where he taught Montaigne as a boy; Owen was a Welshman educated in England, who became a schoolmaster in Warwickshire.

Moreover, these are British authors who – unlike any writers writing in English at this period – were influential across Europe: in the seventeenth century Latin, much like English today, was an international language. A good deal of important recent work has explored the relationship between English poetry and that of other European vernaculars, especially French, Italian and Dutch.Footnote ²³ But vastly more people in early modernity could read Latin than any vernacular language and very few educated readers of the period would have read French or Italian more easily than they read Latin: there is very little evidence for the systematic teaching of any modern language at school until the late seventeenth century at the earliest, and, as Peter Davidson has pointed out, contemporaries who spoke several European languages well were singled out for their prodigious achievement.Footnote ²⁴ It makes no sense to try to map the European-wide exchange and cross-fertilization of poetic styles and forms without putting Latin at the heart of any such study.

English poets were, then, steeped in Latin poetry from their schooldays on, and by ‘Latin poetry’ I mean the Latin poetry of all periods, including their own. Any poet who wished to achieve – as, for instance, Milton did – a European-wide reputation naturally wrote in Latin, and just as many poets of the period, like Hoskyns, Campion, Herbert, Crashaw, Marvell, Milton, Cowley, Addison or Watts, produced work in both languages, so too were there many (now forgotten) poets who made their careers largely or entirely in Latin. Alongside Owen, we could mention in this category Scipio Gentili, Giles and Phineas Fletcher, Thomas Watson, William Gager, Elizabeth Jane Weston, Payne Fisher, Raphael Thorius, Maurice Ewens, William Hogg, William King and Anthony Alsop. Several major figures, such as Andrew Melville and Théodore de Bèze, remembered today for their achievements in other fields, were famous at the time for their Latin verse. Indeed, Calvinists of many nations produced a great deal of innovative Latin poetry in the latter sixteenth and early seventeenth century in their attempt to craft a Protestant Latin poetics. Even poets like Ben Jonson, who, unusually for their period, wrote in adulthood only in the vernacular, were undoubtedly reading widely in Latin.

Most students and even scholars of early modernity, if they are aware of Latin literary culture at all, think of Milton, the only poet whose Latin work has received sustained attention. This makes Milton’s Latinity appear unique. Milton’s Latin verse is unusually good; but in its existence, range, choice of forms and genres and in its relationship to his vernacular poetry it is on the contrary typical and even rather conservative. There is nothing in Milton’s Latin corpus as original, for instance, as Herbert’s Latin verse sequence on the death of his mother, Memoriae Matris Sacrum (1627).

Whereas we would tend to distinguish sharply between classical and post-classical Latin, and often even between classical and late antique Latin literature, early modern teachers and readers alike did so much less: for them Latin literature was a going concern, a matter of fashion and innovation as much as of tradition and the ancient world. If we want to understand Anglo-Latin poetry as a living literature interacting with other Latin and vernacular poetry across Europe, we have to set aside an assumption that (our conception of) the ‘classical’ was always the most highly valued or most carefully imitated, as well as the distorting tendency of the still limited quantity of specialist criticism on ‘neo-Latin’ to treat all post-medieval Latin literature as monolithic. Poets writing Latin verse in the 1550s, just like those writing English or French verse at the same time, naturally did so quite differently from those doing so in the 1650s, even if they were composing a poem on the same topic.

Indeed, the very term ‘neo-’ Latin, often defined specifically in relation to the stylistic imitation of the Augustan classics, is unhelpful here. The great majority of the Latin verse actually produced in early modern England was not particularly classical either in form or in style, especially if by ‘classical’ we mean like Virgil rather than, say, Claudian; and some of it, such as the ongoing composition of rhyming Latin verse throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was markedly not. This period saw widespread innovation in Latin poetry, both in the creation of new forms and in the application of existing forms to new contexts. Equally, several genres which loom large in any survey of classical literature – including full-scale mythological epic, love elegy and (before the eighteenth century) hexameter verse satire – were relatively rarely composed by Latin poets in England. If we approach early modern Latin poetry assuming that the style and form of what we find will closely track the classical canon as it is taught today, we will tend hugely to overemphasize the significance of some types of verse, and to be blind even to the existence of other sorts of great cultural importance and high fashion.

For these reasons I have where possible avoided the term ‘neo-Latin’, preferring the more neutral if cumbersome ‘post-medieval’ Latin or, best of all, just ‘Latin’ alone. No early modern readers spoke of ‘neo-Latin’ style, and though they do sometimes divide lists of authors or works between ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’, such distinctions frequently reflect how works were experienced and understood, and the context in which they were encountered, more than they do historical reality: in one such list, for instance, Palingenius, a shadowy figure but certainly active in Italy during the 1530s, appears among the classical authors – presumably because, as an authoritative text encountered in the early years at school, his Zodiacus Vitae ‘felt’ like a classic.Footnote ²⁵

For scholars and students of classical ‘reception’, this book should function, I hope, as testimony to the enormous importance of Latin literature in early modern England, but also as a note of caution. Most studies of classical reception take the ‘classical’ texts from which they begin for granted, without considering what was actually read in early modernity, or how. It makes a difference to what ‘pastoral’ means if you read Virgil’s Eclogues only after Mantuan’s Adulescentia; to your conception of epigram if you encounter a (carefully expurgated) selection of Martial’s epigrams alongside Owen’s Epigrammata after a year spent memorising Cato’s Distichs; and to your sense of lyric if your metrical handbook refers you to Buchanan’s Latin Psalms alongside the Odes of Horace. Even amongst classical authors, several of the stylistic and generic models that emerge as particularly significant in early modern England are unlikely to be familiar to modern Anglophone classicists: prominent among these are Boethius, Prudentius and, above all, Claudian, the influence of whose work is tracked especially in Chapters 9 (panegyric epic) and 10 (epyllion and epithalamia).

Scripture, Religion and Paraphrase in Early Modern Education and Literary Culture

Boethius, Prudentius and Claudian were valued for their distinctive style, and because they offered a range of formal and generic models not found in earlier classical poetry, but above all for their (supposed) Christianity.Footnote ²⁶ This is a book about early modern poetry, but no such book can succeed if it is not also concerned with religious belief and devotion, in an age in which faith and practice permeated culture and education. The Bible as a literary resource is as foundational for all these poets, whether writing in Latin or English, as classical texts, if not considerably more so; alongside the Bible stand liturgical and devotional material, such as the prayer book and catechism, which were also regularly paraphrased in Latin prose or verse, or alluded to in original compositions. The interrelationship of Latin poetry and religion in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England was just as important for Protestants as it was for Catholics: Calvinism as an international movement, for instance, was grounded in the major Latin texts it produced, and if Latin poetry of passionate personal devotion is traditionally associated with Catholic literary style and education (and the Jesuits in particular), biblical paraphrase was of particular importance to Protestants. In practice, the influence flowed continuously in all directions: the great dissenter poet Isaac Watts reaches a mature style via the lasting influence of the baroque devotional verse of Casimir Sarbiewski, a Polish Jesuit whose marriage of scriptural paraphrase and Horatian poetics was read avidly by poets in England from the second third of the seventeenth century onwards, and who was as influential upon Andrew Marvell and Abraham Cowley as he was upon more obviously sympathetic poets such as Richard Crashaw.

If the Renaissance and the resultant flood of critical editions of classical works renewed poets’ sense of what they could do with the poetry of the ancient world, so too did the scholarly results of the Reformation inspire them with a fresh sense of the literary possibilities of the Bible. Almost all the great wealth of serious scriptural scholarship produced in this period, extending even to editions of the Talmud and grammars of Syriac and Aramaic, was produced in Latin. From the publication of Junius and Tremellius’ Protestant Latin Bible in 1576, most of the people who were writing Latin poetry would also have encountered scripture very often (though of course far from always) in Latin.Footnote ²⁷ Latin continued to be used, for instance, for school and university worship throughout this period. If early modern Latin poetry tends to be overlooked by literary scholars and critics, however, so too does scriptural literature – and the huge quantities of scriptural verse in Latin are thereby at a kind of double disadvantage.

One of the most commonly produced – and generally ignored – modes of scriptural verse was the scriptural ‘paraphrase’, a literary practice that could range from the versifying of scripture with as few changes as possible through to meditational or imaginative pieces based only loosely on the passage to which they were attached. Verse paraphrase (rather than ‘translation’) is perhaps the single most characteristic activity of early modern Latin literary culture. Early modern paraphrase, as I am using the term here, is best understood as the recasting of an authoritative text – whether classical, biblical, doctrinal or canonical in another way – into a new form. This can include translation from one language into another – Dryden uses the word in this way when he employs it as the ‘middle term’ (between ‘metaphrase’ and ‘imitation’) in his famous discussion of translation – but does not necessarily do so. Nor does it necessarily imply, as ‘paraphrase’ usually does in everyday modern English, that the original text is shortened or simplified: indeed Dryden is clear that for him paraphrase involves ‘amplifying’ though not ‘altering’ the sense of the original.Footnote ²⁸

Indeed, many examples of paraphrase operate within a single language, and produce longer texts than the original: examples include such standard exercises as the recasting of the Lord’s Prayer in Latin into elegiac couplets, or of Aesop’s fables (read in simple Latin prose in the early years of a grammar school education) into Latin verse. In these instances, the transformation is primarily a formal one, with a transition from prose into verse. Other kinds of paraphrase may be prose–prose or verse–verse: Augustine Richardson’s paraphrase of Virgil’s first eclogue into sapphic stanzas dates probably from around 1600, and resembles examples given in school textbooks throughout the period.Footnote ²⁹

Paraphrase of all kinds was of great educational and wider cultural importance. Both the use of paraphrases and the production of them was central to school experience: early modern school editions of canonical classical texts made frequent use of Latin–Latin paraphrase to aid comprehension, providing for instance a running prose version alongside Virgil’s Aeneid, and similar tools were commonly provided also for adult use: in Chapter 3 we see how Beza’s 1580 edition of the psalms, used by Mary Sidney in preparing her English versions, provided first a literal translation of the Hebrew into Latin, then (as a parallel text) a somewhat expanded ‘paraphrase’, followed by a more detailed commentary and discussion, and finally, as the fourth element for each psalm, Beza’s verse paraphrases.

Teachers assumed that the versification even of complex material made it more rather than less memorable, and as a result versified Latin renderings of even densely technical subjects are one of the stranger features of early modern culture: we find Latin verse treatises on, for instance, Hebrew grammar, and the so-called ‘Westminster’ grammar, an introduction to ancient Greek written in Latin hexameters, was still being used in the nineteenth century.Footnote ³⁰ ‘Lily’, the (somewhat misleadingly named) standard Latin grammar prescribed for use in English schools makes extensive use of Latin verse summaries, which were frequently quoted: when the schoolboy William in Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor (iv.1) recites grammatical rules from memory, he is quoting from the verse summary in Lily, not the prose text.Footnote ³¹

Religious and linguistic educational aims were frequently combined in paraphrases produced for school use: elementary textbooks for the youngest boys contained simple Latin verse paraphrases of key texts, such as the Lord’s Prayer and catechism; more advanced versions include John Harmar’s Hymnus ad Christum, Historia de Christo Metrica (1658), retelling the story of the Christ in parallel Latin and ancient Greek verse, with each line numbered for classroom use.Footnote ³² This kind of essentially mnemonic use of Latin verse is found widely also in material for adults: versified Latin tags for recalling legal or ecclesiastical rules are found frequently in manuscript. Some items of this kind made it into print: John Glanville’s Articuli Christianae fidei (1613) is a Latin verse paraphrase of the 39 Articles of 1563. Indeed, Latin verse was so prominent a feature not only of what boys read at school, and of what they had to produce, but also of how they memorized what they needed to know, that the association between Latin poetry and education in general must have been very strong for all those who had experienced a grammar school education, as well as those men and (many fewer) women who had received a similar education via private tuition at home.Footnote ³³

Standard school exercises relied upon paraphrase of various kinds, including both what we would recognize as ‘translation’ back and forth into English but also, extremely frequently, within Latin but between forms. Ben Jonson himself notes how he was taught by Camden to render a theme first in prose and then in verse.Footnote ³⁴ Hundreds of instances of exercises of this type survive, with a moral tag or proverbial topic the starting point for a composition first in Latin prose and then in verse. CUL MS Add. 8861/2 is a typical example, containing prose paragraphs on two different sententiae (Pectora nostra duas non admittentia curas, ‘Our hearts do not admit of two concerns at the same time’, and Inter amicos nè sis arbiter, ‘Do not act as a judge between friends’), each followed by a short Latin poem on the same theme in elegiac couplets.Footnote ³⁵ We see this pattern of work reproduced in adult life: hundreds of letters from adults as well as university students offer praise and make a polite request first in prose and then in Latin verse. The collection of letters addressed to Archbishop Whitgift in the late sixteenth century, for instance, includes 33 Latin poems from a range of correspondents including a schoolmaster in Croydon and a fellow of New College, Oxford as well as various clergymen.Footnote ³⁶

Early modern schoolchildren did not have their literary or rhetorical understanding of a text assessed by essay questions or written commentaries as modern students might. They both acquired and demonstrated mastery of authoritative texts almost exclusively in two ways: by oral examination at all levels (from the classroom to public performances) and, in written work, by paraphrase broadly understood. That such paraphrastic ability was considered a marker of educational achievement is clear both from surviving textbooks and from the many instances of presentation volumes containing ‘fine copies’ of the best such work. In his published Progymnasmata of 1590, John Brownswerd (c.1540–89), schoolmaster in Macclesfield, demonstrates the kind of thing that must have been commonplace: his volume of exemplary exercises opens with the rendering of a single scriptural episode (here the story of David and Goliath from 1 Samuel 17) into four Latin versions, each in a different metre.Footnote ³⁷ The book also includes an example of verse–verse Latin paraphrase, in this instance of Horace Odes 1.1 into elegiac couplets.Footnote ³⁸ Sixty years later, Nicholas Grey’s Parabolae evangelicae (1650), written for use at Tonbridge school, works in much the same way: though misleadingly catalogued by the ESTC as a Latin grammar, the volume is in fact a set of verse paraphrases of the Gospel parables in a wide variety of Latin verse forms, effectively a textbook of the New Testament and of Latin verse composition simultaneously.Footnote ³⁹

A manuscript now in Staffordshire County Record Office is a presentation copy of Latin and English verse paraphrases of the first ten of Aesop’s fables, following the order in which they appear in the many late sixteenth-century editions of this text used at school. Dating probably from the latter sixteenth century, the volume is dedicated ‘To that uniquely best and most wise man, Master Bagot, Esquire, patron of letters, for whom Nicholas Fox, Edward Sprott and all his pupils at Bromley earnestly desire the greatest possible happiness and success in all his endeavours’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Aesop’s fables are not themselves Christian texts, but they are strongly moralizing, and readily assimilable to Christian teaching. In the first fable, a cock finds a jewel amid the dung, but not knowing what it is, he wishes he had found a barleycorn instead. The story recalls the Gospel expression ‘pearls before swine’, and the unrecognized ‘jewel’ may be interpreted generally as wisdom, more specifically as Christian truth, or, as in the case of several school editions, as the acquisition of humanist learning itself. Such an interpretation makes it a particularly appropriate text for the early years of grammar school, and this gloss is reflected in the paraphrases offered by the boys from Bromley:

By far the longest poem in a remarkable collection of Latin verse presented to Queen Elizabeth in 1563 by Eton schoolboys is Giles Fletcher’s 314-line ‘eclogue’: in fact an extended verse paraphrase of a passage from Livy, Ab Urbe Condita ix, telling of the humiliating Samnite victory over the Romans at the Caudine Forks in 321 bc. This poem is somewhat oddly – even, we might think, tactlessly – offered to the Queen as consolation for the defeat of the English at Le Havre earlier in 1563.Footnote ⁴² Over a hundred years later, a Dutch school manuscript from the 1680s, now in the British Library, contains many examples, such as the paraphrase of an Horatian ode in honour of Agrippa into Latin hexameters in praise of King William III.Footnote ⁴³

For adults educated in this way, paraphrase is the standard way of engaging closely with the most authoritative texts. Early modern ‘paraphrase culture’ of this kind, though encompassing examples we would describe as translation, has crucial differences from literary translation as it is usually understood today. We tend to assume that vernacular translations of the classics, for instance, exist to allow those who cannot read the language of the original to access such literature. Although there are of course examples of literary translation into both English and Latin for this kind of purpose in early modernity, the majority of ‘translations’ in manuscript sources, and a significant proportion of ‘translations’ also in print, are not translations in this modern sense: they are instances of the wider category of paraphrase. That is, they are not replacements for an original text aimed at those who cannot read it; on the contrary, such material assumes knowledge of the source text. This point about what paraphrase is ‘for’ is emphasized by the habit, particularly striking in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, of producing Latin versions of well-known English poems, a phenomenon discussed briefly in Chapter 7.

While scriptural paraphrase in English, especially by women and especially in the seventeenth century, has attracted some distinguished critical attention, the parallel Latin phenomenon has, with the limited exception of psalm paraphrases, been almost entirely ignored.Footnote ⁴⁴ There is not, to my knowledge, any available scholarly survey or list of such works published or produced in Latin in early modern England. This neglect is particularly surprising given the obvious relevance of the practice, especially the Protestant practice, of scriptural paraphrase to the ‘biblical epic’ projects of Cowley’s Davideis, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and indeed the kind of satirical biblical allegory of Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel, which uses the story of a rebellion against King David to tackle the Exclusion Crisis of 1679–81. For all the emphasis upon classical Latin and Greek texts in the early modern school, boys began and ended their days with prayer and the study of scripture, not of the ancients. Charles Hoole’s suggestions for how to make this framing encounter with scripture educational point to the fundamental importance of paraphrase: he has his sixth formers (the most senior class) begin their day by translating the Greek New Testament into Latin or English and the English or Latin Bible into Greek; as part of their study of Hebrew, be recommends double-translation from the psalter (and subsequently Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Job) into Latin and back into Hebrew.Footnote ⁴⁵

Scriptural verse paraphrase is a constant feature of early modern Anglo-Latin verse, both in print and in manuscript. Poetry of this kind is found throughout the period – from Walter Haddon’s (1516–72) collection of New Testament and psalm paraphrases published in 1555, through to the popular Latin verse paraphrases by William Hogg (or Hog, b. 1652) in the final years of the seventeenth century, which included Latin verse renderings of Job, Proverbs and the Song of Songs as well as of several of Milton’s English poems.Footnote ⁴⁶ It includes work by well-known authors who wrote in many genres (such as Walter Haddon, Andrew Melville and Thomas Drant); ‘specialist’ poets who published mainly or only scriptural paraphrase, such as Alexander Julius and Jakob Falckenburg; and very large numbers of minor poets who included scriptural verse paraphrases within miscellaneous verse collections.Footnote ⁴⁷

English readers naturally also read many examples of Latin scriptural paraphrase made by authors outside England, such as those of the French Protestant Latin poet Paul Thomas (1565–1636), whose work went through multiple editions in the first half of the seventeenth century: Ben Jonson owned a copy of Thomas’ Poemata, in which the volume of Silva sacra is composed almost entirely of scriptural paraphrase.Footnote ⁴⁸ While most such works were read in imported editions, a handful of the most popular, such as Beza’s paraphrase of Job, were printed in England, and some English authors of scriptural paraphrase had a reputation elsewhere in Europe.Footnote ⁴⁹ In manuscript, we find a similar variety, ranging from large-scale professional presentation manuscripts to dozens of examples made apparently for purely personal satisfaction or very limited circulation, and hundreds if not thousands of scriptural Latin poems in private notebooks and miscellanies.Footnote ⁵⁰ Popular scriptural verse included also versified summaries of scripture, either as continuous verse or as sequences of epigrams.Footnote ⁵¹

Works as various as Haddon’s Lord’s Prayer in sapphics; Ross’ Virgilian cento of the Old Testament; Du Bartas’ Septmaines; Herbert’s The Temple, with its close links to the psalters of Philip and Mary Sidney, Beza and Buchanan; Milton’s Paradise Lost; Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder and the many versions of and responses to the Song of Songs, by authors as theologically diverse as Beza, Crashaw, Marvell, Du Moulin and Watts, all arise from, belong to and are legible within essentially the same approach to scriptural authority rooted in paraphrase. I have discussed the practice of paraphrase here in the introduction because the centrality of paraphrase as a literary practice is relevant to all the chapters that follow, and because it is in my view a more helpful model for understanding much (though of course not all) of the poetry with which this book is concerned than ‘translation’, ‘allusion’, ‘intertextuality’ or even ‘imitation’. George Herbert, one of the handful of poets to whom this book returns most frequently, describes prayer as ‘the soul in paraphrase’:

There is nothing basic, boring or purely instrumental about paraphrase in early modernity. Here Herbert associates the concept with constant movement and activity (‘returning’, ‘in pilgrimage’, ‘plummet’); as Brian Cummings has pointed out, Herbert’s sonnet is itself continuously in motion. A single sentence with no main verb, he describes it as a poem which ‘stops without ending’.Footnote ⁵² Any individual piece of paraphrase, likewise, has a first and last sentence or line; but paraphrase itself is a continuous conversation. In Chapter 1, we see how a distinct and enduringly popular but critically neglected type of poem, the ‘moralizing lyric’, emerges from this ‘culture of paraphrase’, in which poets and readers do not distinguish sharply or consistently between the translation, response and imitation of a series of similar texts by authors far removed in time; and how our tendency to insist on these distinctions occludes rather than reveals a meaningful generic category.