Lee Piepho. Holofernes" Mantuan: Italian Humanism in Early Modern England.
Kennedy, William J.
(Currents in Comparative Romance Languages and Literatures, 103.) New York and Washington, D.C.: Peter Lang, 2001. viii + 174 pp. append, bibl. index. $50.95. ISBN: 0-8204-5276-9.
In this elegantly written book Lee Piepho sets out to "make detailed soundings" of Mantuan's status in the educational, economic, political, and religious environment of the English Renaissance and to use his findings "as a test case to broaden future discussions of the place of Italian humanism in the culture of early modern England" (5). To achieve these goals Piepho establishes an admirably sophisticated structure to evaluate the impact of Mantuan's Latin poetry in the Tudor period. This structure attends to the agencies by which Mantuan and his texts were introduced into England--the personalities, that is, who advocated for the publication of those texts and their incorporation into school curricula. It analyzes the mechanisms that made these texts available to specific interpretations at the time, largely through printed editions with marginal commentaries but also through handwritten glosses and annotations passed to successive users of a given volume. It links these agencies and mechanisms to various communities of readers as the texts were disseminated. And in each instance it inquires into political, economic, and religious factors that conditioned the reading of Mantuan and inflected its appropriation in sixteenth-century England. The result is a superbly textured study of influence, incorporation, and literary imitation in the Renaissance.
Piepho begins with the statutes that John Colet set down between 1512 and 1517 for teaching Mantuan's texts in St. Paul's Grammar School. The primary agency was Erasmus' endorsement of the fifteenth-century Carmelite poet as a "Christianus Maro," but Piepho complicates the familiar picture. First, neither Colet nor Erasmus appears to have given preference to the pastoral eclogues that Elizabethan writers valued so greatly. Rather they esteemed Mantuan for his hagiographic narratives, the Partbenice Mariana and the Parthenice Catharinaria, which Piepho situates in a Italian humanist context often overlooked. Here Aldus Manutius and others showed great interest in recovering and publishing the works of such early Christian writers as Prudentius, Sedulius, Juvencus, and Lactantius, and Mantuan's own religious poetry both stimulated interest and encouraged further responses to it. As Piepho shows, Erasmus himself might have disagreed with the priority Colet placed on the hagiographic subject matter. The latter, it appears, valued Mantuan's piety as an antidote to the "blotterature" of pagan authors such as the racy Terence, Ovid, and elegiac poets, who might corrupt young minds (27).
As Piepho further shows, it is ironic that Mantuan would later become more esteemed for his satiric eclogues against church abuses. Here Piepho builds a compelling argument based upon the mechanisms of published editions of the Adulescentia as the latter entered school curricula in the 1540s. The chief mechanism was the commentary produced by Badius Ascentius for his edition of Mantuan printed at Paris in 1502. Following the format of Servian annotation with an emphasis on grammar, vocabulary, classical parallels, and simple paraphrase, Badius produced a text fit for classroom use. More importantly, as his commentary interprets the moral tone of the poetry, it downplays the satiric content and its attack on clerical abuses, "overlook[ing] a good deal in order to emphasize the exemplary qualities" instead (53). Badius does not want to scandalize young minds that, in any case, were probably not ready for such a critique. Badius' edition nonetheless became the preferred text in reformist England, where schoolmasters did not hesitate to expose popish error for the benefit of their charges. The reason Piepho adduces for the edition's popularity was economic: Badius' mass-printed text proved more affordable for classroom use than a competing edition published by Vanrentinus at Toulouse. The long line of writers who then appropriated Mantuan's eclogues "through the filter of Badius' commentary" (67)--including Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, Michael Drayton, and Robert Burton--could and did reintegrate Mantuan's satire with their own political, religious, and philosophical agendas.
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 l'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 Anti-Christ 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
