Pierre Laurens.La dernière muse latine: Douze lectures poétiques, de Claudien à la génération baroque. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2008. xviii + 328 pp. index. €27. ISBN: 978–2–251–44353–9.
The essays contained in this collection of twelve chapters range widely across the field of postclassical Latin literature, but with a central focus on Renaissance and baroque poetry. Five chapters are written specifically for the collection, while seven others are revised versions of previously published articles. What they all share in common is an acute sensitivity to the sonorities and the imagery of poetry in Latin — and other languages — and an unerring ear for the French language in the translations that accompany most of the poems discussed. After an opening essay on nine epigrams by Claudian, followed by an essay on two medieval poems on precious stones, one by Marbodius of Rennes, the other from the Carmina Burana, there follow two chapters that focus on Petrarch. The first of these is a very fine analysis of the Italian poet’s fascination with sound and rhythm, and his original and creative use of the dactylic hexameter in his epic poem Africa. The second examines Familiares 24.10, Petrarch’s epistle to Horace, written in a Horatian style and anticipating, as Laurens suggests, Poliziano’s Sylvae in its treatment of the role of imitation and intertextuality in Latin composition, and the notion of inspiration, or oestrus. Both these essays are characterized by a refreshingly sensitive appreciation of the musicality of postclassical Latin verse and a sharp understanding of the creative process at work in Neo-Latin writing. This is continued in chapter 5, a fascinating analysis of the central role of meter in poetry and the awareness of this in readings of Virgil by Salutati, Pontano, and J. C. Scaliger. In this highly stimulating essay, Laurens analyzes the relationship between sound and sense as perceived, not only by the three Italian humanists mentioned, but also by George of Trebizond and his own source, Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Laurens considers particular examples of the effect of certain sound combinations and, following Genette, points to the mimetic potential of sounds within individual words, even if words themselves may not be mimetic by nature. The good poet will always choose words whose sounds reinforce and enhance meaning. Chapter 6 explores the theme of exile in one of the Naeniae (Laments) of the Greek poet Michael Marullus, who was conceived, as he liked to claim, in the city of Constantinople just before its sack by the Turks in 1453, and who expressed himself with great sensitivity to sound and rhythm in a language which he considered to be alien to his cultural heritage. Chapter 7 focuses on poems by one of Marullus’s imitators, the hugely popular Johannes Secundus, whose neo-Catullan Basia (Kisses) helped establish a new genre of Renaissance love poetry. In this essay, Laurens points to various parallels between the young Dutchman’s celebration of the lovers’ embrace with both classical poets and contemporary authors. The eighth