Day 1: Thursday 23 May: 2.00 - 6.00pm
Day 2: Friday 24 May: 10.00am - c.5.00pm

Room G7, Ground Floor, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU

The association of poetry with the religious realm is long-established. Cicero’s conviction that poets were infused with ‘a divine spirit’ and ‘bestowed on us by God’ endured and continued to hold sway in the Early Modern imagination. This conference aims to explore how these established associations interact with the new confessional impulses which emerge in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It will look at how the Neo-Latin poetry of this era engages with and reflects the concerns and conflicts of the European reformations. Particular attention will be given to the attempts made by individuals or institutions to craft a distinctive poetics in service of particular religious positions, Protestant or Catholic. A key objective will be to examine what Neo-Latin poetry had to offer this confessional impulse: was it functioning as an act of devotion, a didactic tool to promulgate a particular message, a lever for conversion, an alternative to preaching, a mode of theology or scriptural exegesis, or a medium for communicating ideas about doctrinal or moral reform? We also welcome approaches that consider the perceived purpose of classical learning in any of these religiously partisan productions.

Hosted by the Warburg Institute, University of London. Organised by Nathaniel Hess (Frances Yates Fellow, Warburg Institute) and Lucy Nicholas (Lecturer in Latin and Greek Language and Culture, Warburg Institute). Generously supported by the Institute of Classical Studies(Opens in new window)Link opens in a new window, University of London, and the Society for Neo-Latin Studies(Opens in new window)Link opens in a new window.