The Battle of Lepanto ed. by Elizabeth R. Wright, Sarah Spence, and Andrew Lemons (review)

This new volume in the I Tatti Renaissance Library series is an anthology of Neo-Latin poems written in response to one of the best known episodes of war in modern history, the Battle of Lepanto, which was fought on October 7, 1571. Historians are still debating the extent to which the battle marked a turning point in the history of relations between the Ottoman Empire and Christian Europe, bearing in mind that the Turkish fleet was rebuilt in just a few months and that the Turks continued their military activities in the Mediterranean in the years following. At any rate, in Christian Europe at the time, the naval victory of the Holy League over the Ottoman Empire was presented as proof that the Ottoman Empire could be defeated and its advance on the Western Mediterranean be halted. The poems in this anthology, written before the first anniversary of the battle, are among the first literary responses to the news of the victory of the Christian fleet, under the command of John of Austria.

This anthology includes the edition and translation of twenty-two poems written by twenty-two poets (three of them anonymous). The variety of genres and registers in this anthology—from epitaphs, epigrams and elegies to long narrative poems—provides a sample of the vitality enjoyed by Neo-Latin lyric poetry during the second half of the sixteenth century. All the authors are Italian, with the exception of Juan Latino, a black African former slave who achieved fame in Granada as a professor of Latin. Most of the poems by Italian poets included in this volume appeared in two anthologies of poems about the Battle of Lepanto, one by Pietro Gherardi (In foedus et victoriam contra Turcas iuxta sinum Corinthiacum, Venice, 1572), the other by Luigi Groto (Trofeo della vittoria sacra, Venice, 1572), although the editors point out that many of these compositions had circulated previously in print form. Juan Latino’s Austrias carmen was first published as part of his volume of Lepanto poetry (Ad catholicam pariter et invictissimum Philippum Dei gratia Hispaniarum regem, Granada, 1573), and was the only one of the texts that had a modern translation (La Austriada de Juan Latino, translated by José Antonio Sánchez Marín, Granada, 1981), although that edition contained neither an introduction nor notes to the text. The editors have collected together every printed testimony and surviving manuscript of each of these poems and taken them into account to establish the Latin text.

The edition follows the pattern of the ITRL series. After a brief but insightful introduction, the Latin texts are published with facing translations, and all information about the texts is reserved for the final part of the book. The prose translation sets out to faithfully communicate the content of the Latin version but without sacrificing the literary style; this can be appreciated especially in the examples of dialogue poetry—Giovanni Antonio Taglietti’s “Nautical Eclogue,” for example—and in the first-person speeches in the longest poems, such as Giovanni Baptista Arcucci’s epyllion and Juan Latino’s carmen. The appendix that refers to the authors and the notes to the texts and translations are both sections in which the editors provide information that is consistently relevant and to the point, as is the norm in this series. The notes to the text give an account of the cultural or political significance of certain allusions and, in the same way, highlight imitations of classical texts with Virgil’s Aeneid being the basic model for all of them. At the same time, the biographical notes, concise but full of pertinent information—see, for example, the notes on Carlo Malatesta or Ottaviano Manini—bear witness to the research work that went into the edition and translation of each of the poems anthologized in this volume.

In the majority of these poems, the image of...