Milton among the Romans: The Pedagogy and Influence of Milton's Latin Curriculum. Richard J. DuRocher
The English writer who reworked Mantuan's satire most effectively was Edmund Spenser, whose "July" and "September" eclogues in The Shepheardes Calender create "a trompe I'oeil in which [the critical] charges can apply like Mantuan's to the Curia at Rome but can be leveled with equal probability at the English Church" (118). To arrive at this new phase of literary imitation, Piepho narrates subtle transformations in the Elizabethan appropriation of Mantuan's texts. Just as Luther had applauded their satire, so John Bale — himself a Carmelite monk before the Reformation — esteemed it as "a witness against the workings of the AntiChrist at Rome" (96). Following his lead, Barnabe Googe echoed Mantuan in his eight eclogues to criticize Marian abuses under the Catholic Lord Chancellor Stephen Gardiner. Similarly Giles Fletcher the Elder echoed Mantuan in pastoral satires excoriating Edward Bonner, the Marian bishop of London. But Spenser proved more inventive than either as he oriented his satire against abuses in the English church, indicting such putative protectors of it as his own patron Leicester, Lord Burghley, and its head, the Queen of England. Mantuan's fortunes expired when such later poets as Pope disparaged his rustic allegory. Piepho associates their final flowering in 1670 with an anonymous "Mantuan English'd," notable as a misogynist diatribe that provoked an anonymous broadside response, "An Answer to Mantuan." Piepho provides both texts in a useful appendix to his work, along with the text of a Latin eclogue by Fletcher on the death of Bishop Bonner. In all, Piepho has written a careful, instructive book that well repays the reading. WILLIAM J. KENNEDY Cornell University