The Reception of Horace in the Courses of Poetics at the Kyiv Mohyla Academy: 17Th-First Half of the 18Th Century
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The Reception of Horace in the Courses of Poetics at the Kyiv Mohyla Academy: 17th-First Half of the 18th Century The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Siedina, Giovanna. 2014. The Reception of Horace in the Courses of Poetics at the Kyiv Mohyla Academy: 17th-First Half of the 18th Century. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:13065007 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA © 2014 Giovanna Siedina All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: Author: Professor George G. Grabowicz Giovanna Siedina The Reception of Horace in the Courses of Poetics at the Kyiv Mohyla Academy: 17th-First Half of the 18th Century Abstract For the first time, the reception of the poetic legacy of the Latin poet Horace (65 B.C.-8 B.C.) in the poetics courses taught at the Kyiv Mohyla Academy (17th-first half of the 18th century) has become the subject of a wide-ranging research project presented in this dissertation. Quotations from Horace and references to his oeuvre have been divided according to the function they perform in the poetics manuals, the aim of which was to teach pupils how to compose Latin poetry. Three main aspects have been identified: the first consists of theoretical recommendations useful to the would-be poets, which are taken mainly from Horace’s Ars poetica. The second aspect is the use of Horace’s poetry as a model of word usage, tropes, rhetorical figures, and metrical schemes. Finally, the last important aspect of the reception of Horace is how his works could be imitated and his words or dicta borrowed in the composition of poetry, in which students were expected to exercise as part of the poetics course. The research draws the conclusion that Horace’s legacy was of paramount importance in the manuals analyzed: on the one hand the Mohylanian poetics teachers’ tendency (after Renaissance literary theorists and critics) to consider poetry within iii rhetorical categories rendered Horace’s Ars Poetica extremely congenial to them. On the other, Horace’s ideas were extrapolated from their original context and at times modified to serve a moralistic and “utilitarian” conception of poetry, which considered the latter as an instrumental science that served the ends of moral philosophy. With its metrical virtuosity and brilliant verbal craftsmanship, Horace’s poetry provided an excellent model for the introduction of Christian content. The analysis of the way pagan authors (Horace first and foremost) were elaborated in a Christian key in the poetry composed by Mohylanian teachers and pupils indicates that education (and with it the assimilation of the Classics) at the KMA was not extraneous to the integration of ancient learning in Christian thinking as it took place in the different confessional schools of contemporary Western Europe. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract………………………………………………………………………….iii Abbreviations……………………………………………………………………vi INTRODUCTION. The Role of Poetics in the Kyiv Mohyla Collegium Curriculum. State of the Studies and Outline of the Dissertation………………...1 CHAPTER 1. Poesis utens: the Reception of Horace’s Teaching on poema – poesis – poeta in the General Poetics…………………………………………….21 CHAPTER 2. The Reception of Horace’s Metrics and usus verborum in the Teaching of Poetry……………………………………………………………...112 CHAPTER 3. The Teaching of Lyric Poetry. The Legacy of Horace in the Neo- Latin Poetry of Mohylanian Teachers and Students of Poetics………………...173 CONCLUSIONS………………………………………………………………252 BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………….259 v ABBREVIATIONS bk. book bks. books ca. circa about ch. chapter cf. confer compare e.g. exempli gratia for example et al. et alii and others etc. et cetera and so forth f. folio ff. and following i.e. id est that is l. line ll. lines ms. manuscript mss. manuscripts no. number n. p. no publisher op. cit. opere citato in the work cited r. recto v. verso vol. volume vols. volumes vi INTRODUCTION The Role of Poetics in the Kyiv Mohyla Collegium Curriculum. State of the Studies and Outline of the Dissertation The establishment in 1631-1632 of the Kyiv Mohyla Collegium with a curriculum modeled on that of contemporary European Jesuit schools, marked the first widely recognized acceptance of a secular culture deeply rooted in the Latin language and in both Classical (mainly Latin) and Neo-Latin culture and literature by an East-Slavic Orthodox institution. The Collegium officially acquired the status of an Academy at the turn of the 17th century,1 and will be referred to hereinafter as the KMA. The curriculum required some adjustment: for instance, while in Jesuit schools new beginners were required to know how to read and write, so that teaching could begin “not below the rudiments of grammar,” this was probably not a prerequisite for admission to the Mohyla Collegium. Be that as it may, as in most Jesuit schools and academies, written and oral Latin, and its use in both poetry and prose, was taught in the first three classes of the curriculum. They were followed by the so-called humaniora classes, that is poetics and rhetoric, the first constituting also a preparation for the latter. In these the pupils, who were already proficient in Latin grammar, learned to compose different kinds of poetical works and speeches for various occasions of public and private life. Pupils in these classes also received extensive teaching in secular and biblical history, mythology, geography and other subjects. In short, the poetics courses taught in Latin at the KMA contained the knowledge 1 On the differing opinions concerning the time of acquisition of the academic status, cf. Sydorenko, 1977, p. 61 ff. 1 deemed indispensable for the pupils to compose Latin poetry. The structure of the courses might vary, but as a rule, they all consisted of two parts: the first, usually called general poetics, provided information on the origin, the nature, the object, the function (utility and dignity) and the purpose of poetry, as well as the necessary teachings on prosody and metrics.2 The so-called particular poetics, on the other hand, contained detailed information about single poetic genres of Latin poetry, namely epic poetry, tragedy, comedy, satire, epigrammatic poetry, lyric poetry, elegiac and bucolic poetry, and others. Epic poetry was given a pre-eminenent place, and this was in line with the importance attributed to it in Western European literatures since the Middle Ages and until the late Baroque.3 Poetics courses also generally provided a basic understanding of tropes, rhetorical figures and the first rudiments of rhetoric. Moreover, quite often they also included a chapter on eruditiones, which were deemed part of the subsidia poetica, and were a sort of encyclopedic exposition on Greek and Latin mythology from which the budding poet could and should draw material for comparisons, similes, metaphors, allegories and the like. Some manuals also featured an appendix entitled Flores, a sort of anthology of apophtegmata of Latin and Neo-Latin writers. The position of the sections on metrics could vary: thus, for instance, some manuals provided information on metrics both in the general poetics and when dealing with single poetic genres in the particular poetics (e.g. epic poetry and its meter, i.e. the hexameter, elegy and the pentameter to form the elgiac distich, lyric 2 In general poetics authors also dealt with the subject matter of poetry and its characteristics, such as imitatio, inventio, poetic language. 3 The expansion in Mohylanian poetics of the topic of epic poetry, which considers all activities involving the intellect as noble and as worthy of celebration as military feats on the battlefield, reflects the Renaissance approach to the heroicum carmen, which was called to go beyond the celebration of “res gestae regumque ducumque et tristia bella” (“the exploits of kings and captains and the sorrows of war”), as Horace had defined the topic of the heroic poem. All translations of quotations from Horace’s Satires, Epistles and Ars poetica are taken from Horace, 1970. 2 poetry and the different metrical systems it uses, especially in the poetry of Horace and M.K. Sarbiewski, and so on). The composition of Latin poetry was a mandatory exercise for pupils studying poetics. Therefore, the teachers themselves provided poetic samples in different poetic genres that their pupils could take as models. However, it was only with the appearance of F. Prokopovych’s De arte poetica libri tres that poetical exercises were treated in detail in a separate section inserted in the manual.4 Each poetics teacher was expected to write his own manual (the same is true also for the subsequent rhetoric course ). To date, only about 30 of these manuals have survived, most of them in manuscript form,5 and they are housed in the manuscript section of the National Library of Ukraine in Kyiv6 (hereinafter NBU). The content, the sources and the aims of the Mohylanian poetics have been reconstructed in their general outline in the works of a few Ukrainian, Russian and Polish scholars. The first description of the manuscripts of Mohylanian poetics and rhetoric courses was made by Petrov (Petrov 1875-1879; Petrov 1891-1904). He also penned the first important study dedicated to Mohylanian poetics (Petrov 1866-1868). In it, on the basis of some poetics and rhetoric manuals (mainly from the 18th century), the scholar analyzes the conceptions of literary theory taught by Mohylanian teachers, both concerning general 4 The importance of exercise in the learning process is stressed in the Ratio studiorum (1599), the study plan that regulated the pedagogic and didactic work of the Jesuits, on whose school system the curriculum of the KMA was modeled.