Edmund Spenser and Neo-Latin Literature: An Autograph Manuscript on Petrus Lotichius and His Poetry

Introduction

As scholars have come to attend more and more to readers' annotations as indicators of habits of reading, marked copies of books owned by English writers have come under increasing scrutiny. But the extent to which these copies survive varies widely, from Robert Burton's vast library to what may be the single surviving volume owned by William Shakespeare.¹ In this respect Edmund Spenser is an especially unfortunate case. One of the most learned poets of his age, he seems to have left behind very few of his books. His copy of the 1590 Faerie Queene survives, as do copies of two books that he sent to Gabriel Harvey² The Folger Shakespeare Library has in its collections, however, two of what may prove to be the most interesting of his few extant books. The last leaf of one of them contains what Peter Beal describes as the most "literary" of his surviving autographs.³ This autograph manuscript in fact strikingly reveals Spenser's active interest in the international Latin literature that, crossing the boundaries of territorial states, continued to flourish throughout Europe during the sixteenth century.

Spenser's choice of the texts that he transcribed can be most immediately explained by the books with which they are associated. These texts appear on the final leaf of a collection of verse and prose by the German Neo-Latin poet Georgius Sabinus that was in all likelihood bound with and preceded a copy of the poems of Petrus Lotichius Secundus when Spenser owned the volume.⁴ The texts are a letter by Erhard Stibar, Lotichius's pupil and the nephew of his patron, partly concerning him;⁵ and two short poems, one by "Artifex Athensis"⁶ and the other by Joannes de Silva (Jean du Bois),⁷ praising Lotichius's poetry. The Sabinus collection contains a number of letters by Erasmus, Pietro Bembo, and other writers that praise Sabinus or are otherwise associated with the German poet. The editor of the Lotichius volume likewise included a short appendix of letters by him, and Spenser would seem to have wanted to add to this background material by copying additional texts onto what was an otherwise blank leaf at the end of the preceding volume.

Beyond this immediate reason for Spenser's choice of texts, his transcriptions indicate his interest, perhaps during the important period of his poetic apprenticeship, in some of the most distinguished poetry of the first half of the sixteenth century. By 1500 Italian humanism had moved north into present-day Germany where it helped to stimulate some of Europe's finest Neo-Latin verse.⁸ Sabinus and Lotichius were

Edmund Spenser's autograph in his copy of Georgius Sabinus, Poëmata (Leipzig, 1563), fol. m8r. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Edmund Spenser's autograph in his copy of Georgius Sabinus, Poëmata (Leipzig, 1563), fol. m8v. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

among the foremost writers within this movement.⁹ But whereas Sabinus is largely remembered today as Philip Melanchthon's son-in-law and the author of a widely circulated treatise on the composition of verse, it is a tribute to Spenser's poetic eye that his transcriptions indicate that he was especially attracted to Lotichius, the writer who has subsequently come to be judged, in Fred Nichols's words, as "the most accomplished Neo-Latin poet of Germany."¹⁰

Although there is no explicit indication of when Spenser owned the volumes,¹¹ it is not unreasonable to suppose that he would have purchased or otherwise acquired them at a time when he was still learning the craft of poetry. The Lotichius text was printed in 1576, the Sabinus collection as early as 1563.¹² The Shepheardes Calender, Spenser's selfconscious debut as England's new poet, appeared in 1579. Behind it, however, stood years of verse composition. Indeed, portions of his collection of pastoral poems may date back to...