This talk looks at the pastoral hexameter Ecloga (1433-34) of Eenea Silvio Piccolomini (1405-64, Pope Pius II 1458-64). This poem naturally owes much to Vergil's Eclogues lexically and thematically; its setting at the sanctuary of San Giulio at Lago d'Orta near Novara suggests further links with early Christian prose and verse hagiography, and the poem also draws on the allegorical approach to pastoral in Petrarch's Carmen Bucolicum and its interests in regional politics. It is addressed to another rising poet, Maffeo Vegio (1407-58), who had already written his well-known Aeneid XIII, and was seeking patronage from the Visconti of Milan, a family also then served by Piccolomini.

Programme here.

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George Buchanan (1506-82) had a remarkable career: a distinguished classical teacher and scholar who spent much of 1520-60 in France, in his later years he returned to his native Scotland and was head of a college at his alma mater St Andrews, tutor to both Mary Queen of Scots and her son James VI, a leading figure in the new Church of Scotland and a key minister to James at the start of his reign.
This talk gives some introduction to the range of his neo-Latin poetry, feted all over Europe in his lifetime, and looks in some detail at his use of Horace in his Psalm Paraphrases and encomiastic odes, and of Vergil and others in his Silvae.

Programme here.

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Conference held at the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences H.C. Andersens Boulevard 35, 1553 Copenhagen C

Programme here.

Registration required.

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