Sofia Guthrie
My research
The title of my PhD thesis, completed under the supervision of Professor Penny RobertsLink opens in a new window (History, University of Warwick) and Professor Andrew LairdLink opens in a new window (Classics, Brown University) was 'Antoine de Garissoles' Adolphid (1649), A Huguenot Latin Epic: An edited text, translation and historical commentary’.
Antoine Garissoles, a leading figure within the Huguenot church in the 1640s, was a minister as well as a professor of Theology at the Protestant Academy at Montauban. The subject of his epic poem was Gustavus Adolphus (1594-1632), the king of Sweden, whom Garissoles portrays as a heroic defender of his fellow Protestants in the Thirty Years' War.
My translation of the Adolphid is complemented by an assessment of the poem's engagement with the wider political, religious and literary contexts. This research provides new insights into Huguenot confessional identity, the survival strategies employed by the Huguenots in a hostile national environment, and the theme of international Protestantism in the seventeenth century.
My research interests
- The use of the epic genre as a vehicle of ideology and political identity
- Early modern Sweden, especially the Vasa dynasty
- The use of the literary figure of Gustavus Adolphus in the formation of a European-wide Protestant identity
- The seventeenth-century Huguenots and their international networks
- The role of France's Protestant academies in the Huguenot cause
Publications
- 'Confessional identities and national allegiances: The siege of Montauban (1621) in three Latin epics', in R. Kuhn and D. Melde (eds.), La guerre et la paix dans la poésie épique en France (1500-1800), Text und Kontext 40 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2020), 123-36
- How to mock a dead general: Albrecht von Wallenstein and the battle of Lützen in Antoine Garissoles' Adolphid (1649), Bibliotheca Neo-Latina Upsaliensis 12 (Uppsala: [Peter Sjökvist and Krister Östlund]: 2019)
- 'Goths, Gauls and Franks in Antoine Garissoles' Adolphid (1649): How to rewrite the ancient history of Sweden', in B. Roling, B. Schirg and S. Bauhaus (eds.), Apotheosis of the North: The Swedish Appropriation of Classical Antiquity around the Baltic Sea and Beyond (1650-1800) (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), 175-86
Conference papers
2022
- '"All the North compressed into narrow bounds": Textile Ekphrasis in an epic about Gustavus Adolphus', at The Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, Dublin, April 2022
2021
- 'Confessional identities and national allegiances: The siege of Montauban in three Latin epic poems', at Assiéger et Défendre Les Villes En France Pendant Les Guerres de Rohan (1620-1629), Montauban, December 2021
2019
- 'Calvinist Orthodoxy and Pan-Protestantism: A Huguenot theologian and his epic poem about a Lutheran warrior king', at Holy Wars and Sacred States: Religious Conflict, the State, and Sacred Power in Early Modern Europe, Queen's University, Belfast, July 2019
2018
- 'The power of the digression: Main action and episode in a Huguenot epic about Gustavus Adolphus', at 11. Kongress des Frankoromanistenverbands. Krieg und Frieden: zur Produktivität von Krisen und Konflikten, University of Osnabrück, September 2018
- 'Fatal attraction: The afterlife of Dido in Antoine Garissoles' Adolphid (1649)', at Love and Heroism in Neo-Latin Epic, at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Neo-Latin Studies, Innsbruck, September 2018
- 'France's last wars of religion and the siege of Montauban (1621) in three Latin epics: confessional identities and national allegiances', at The Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, New Orleans, March 2018
2017
- 'The classical tradition in the service of the Protestant cause: Dishevelled Germania in an epic about Gustavus Adolphus', at Global Reformations: Transforming Early Modern Religions, Societies, and Cultures, University of Toronto, September 2017
- 'The Protestant academy at Montauban and the Huguenot cause: A collection of seventeenth-century dissertations', at the Department of History Postgraduate Conference, University of Warwick, May 2017
- 'The epic simile as a vehicle of ideology: Antoine Garissoles' Adolphid and the Thirty Years' War', at The Neo-Latin Symposium, Cork, April 2017
2016
- 'The politics of Huguenot victimhood in Antoine Garissoles' Adolphid (1649), a Latin epic', at The Sixteenth Century Society Conference, Bruges, August 2016
- 'Iceland and Mount Hekla in Antoine Garissoles' Adolphid (1649): An anti-pastoral', at the Classical Association Conference, Edinburgh, April 2016
- 'Antoine Garissoles' Adolphid as a historical source', at The Society for Neo-Latin Studies Postgraduate Event, at Merton College, Oxford, March 2016
2015
- 'Huguenot royalism and victimhood in Antoine Garissoles’ Adolphid (1649), a Latin epic poem', at Department of History Postgraduate Conference, University of Warwick, May 2015
2014
- 'Goths and Gauls in Antoine Garissoles' Adolphid', at The Apotheosis of the North, Berlin, December 2014
- 'How to slander a dead general: The deceptive prophecy as defamation in Antoine Garissoles' Adolphid', at the Department of Classics and Ancient History Postgraduate Colloquium, University of Warwick, May 2014
- 'A Protestant Palinurus', at Using, Misusing and Abusing Latin in the Early Modern Period, University of Warwick, April 2014
External seminar presentations
- 'Entertainment and curiosities: Gustavus Adolphus at the Electoral palace in Dresden (an excerpt from book 7 of Antoine Garissoles' Adolphid)', at Nylatinskt Nätverk, Uppsala University, November 2019
- 'Adrift in the flood: The poetic persona in Antoine Garissoles' Adolphid', at The Medieval and Renaissance Cultural Studies Research Group, University of Calgary, October 2017
- 'Excerpts from book 2 of Antoine Garissoles' Adolphid: translation and commentary', at Nylatinskt Nätverk, Uppsala University, February 2016
Sofia Guthrie
The copy of the Adolphid held at the Beinecke Library, Yale University
Antoine Garissoles (1587-1651), Huguenot pastor and professor of Theology at the Protestant academy at Montauban