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  • Epigrammatum liber unus: Epistolarum libri duo
  • Philip Ford
Johannes Secundus . Epigrammatum liber unus: Epistolarum libri duo. Vol. 3 of Œuvres complètes. Textes de la Renaissance 125. Ed. Roland Guillot. Trans. Daniel Delas and Jean-Claude Ternaux. Paris: Honoré Champion Editeur, 2007. 586 pp + 24 b/w pls. index. illus. €107. ISBN: 978–2–7453–1542–7.

The third volume of Roland Guillot's edition of the complete works of Johannes Secundus contains the Dutch poet's book of Epigrammata and two books [End Page 214] of Epistolae. This time, the editor has the assistance of Daniel Delas for the French translation of the epigrams, while Jean-Claude Ternaux is largely responsible for the epistles, aided by Guillot in the annotations.

Epigrams were the staple diet of Renaissance Neo-Latinists, recording the poet's reactions to people and events and his state of mind and prejudices, and at times musing on the nature of life, death, and other issues. Secundus's poems are entirely characteristic of this, showing at the same time the various predictable influences on his compositions: Catullus and Martial among the Roman poets and, of course, the Greek Anthology. Roland Guillot does a good job in the introduction of identifying these various influences —to which might be added the Horace of the Epodes —as well as giving a sense of the humanist circles in which Secundus was moving. And truly moving, since the epigrams cover a geographically wide area, reflecting the poet's various periods in the Low Countries, France, and Spain, and his fascination with the locations he visited. Guillot not only provides some useful information on the background to these peregrinations, he also offers a useful analysis of the organization of the volume, and the notes on the individual poems are rich in details on the various individuals about whom and to whom Secundus is writing, as well as presenting biographical details on the author himself. The text and translation are in general more accurate than in the previous volumes.

Similarly, the epistles receive a full and generally helpful introduction at the hands of Jean-Claude Ternaux, who situates Secundus's compositions in their literary setting and examines the themes that he covers in these works. Along with the elegy, which it resembles to a large extent through meter (all thirteen epistles of book 1 are in elegiac couplets, though the six poems of book 2 are in hexameters), length, and content, the epistle was a very popular genre in the first part of the sixteenth century in both Neo-Latin and French vernacular literature. The addressees range from family members to public figures of various kinds, allowing the poet to deploy a range of styles in his poems. Once again, the notes are exhaustive and helpful, both from the historical and biographical point of view, and in terms of setting the works in their literary context. Through these poems, as in the epigrams, the young poet's persona emerges clearly, an appealing and multitalented young man whose early death must have left a considerable gap in the literary world of his time.

The book contains a number of black-and-white plates illustrating various of the epigrams and epistles. The typographical layout of the text still leaves something to be desired, with far too many blank pages, but from a scholarly point of view, this volume is more successful than the previous two, and offers a range of interesting and original compositions by a brilliant young talent. [End Page 215]

Philip Ford
Clare College, Cambridge
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