Erasmus on Baptista Mantuanus and Christian Religious Verse by Lee Piepho in a Frequently Cited Letter Written in 1496 to H

Erasmus on Baptista Mantuanus and Christian Religious Verse by Lee Piepho a frequently cited letter written in 1496 to his patron, Hendrik van Ber- gen,In Bishop of Cambrai, Erasmus favorably compared the verse of Baptista Mantuanus (commonly known as "Mantuan" in England since the Renais- sance) with the poetry of his fellow-citizen Virgil: I am myself happy to be of my friend Gaguin's opinion in thinking that even ecclesiastical subjects can be treated brilliantly in vernacular works provided the style is pure. And I would not reprehend anyone for applying Egyptian trimmings, but I am against the appropriation of Egypt in its entirety. In this regard the celebrated Baptista Mantuanus performed a model service in my opinion. As he happened to have Mantua for his na- tive land, like Virgil, so too he came close enough to Virgil in learning, and seems to me to deserve the title of the Christian Virgil just as much as Lactantius deserves that of the Christian Cicero which Agricola used to give him. And, if my prophetic sense does not deceive me, there will surely come a time when Baptista will fall but a little below his fellow countryman in fame and renown, as soon as the passage of years draws aside envy's veil. (CWE 1:103-4; Allen 49, lines 92-103) "This amazing judgement suggests that Erasmus was more concerned with Mantuan's religious tone than with his workmanship." So W. P. Mustard, ex- pressing a common note of bewilderment over the admiration shown by Eras- 1 mus and other Northern humanists for the poetry of the Italian Carmelite. Donald L. Clark, writing of the recommendation of Mantuan's poetry by Eras- mus' friend, John Colet, remarks that the curriculum urged for St. Paul's hardly "2 reflects the canon of "good literature ... as summed up by Quintilian. But to understand the logic behind Erasmus' endorsement, we should put aside Clark's assumption that Colet and Erasmus would simply have equated "good [46] 47 literature" with Quintilian's prescriptions. Just what sorts of works by Mantuan did Erasmus have in mind and what in particular did he value in them? And was the judgment expressed in his letter of 1496 immutable-or did Erasmus in part change his mind about the Italian poet as his views of the nature and making of Christian religious verse changed? When Erasmus pronounced Mantuan to be "Christianus Maro," it is almost impossible that he had in mind the Adulescentia, the highly successful collec- tion of Mantuan's pastoral poemsj for which he is largely remembered today. Erasmus is speaking about poems with ecclesiastical subjects, but fewer than half of the Adulxscentia can be so described. More important is the date of his letter. Mantuan's eclogues were first composed in the 1460s and released through manuscript publication by 1476. Circulation outside Italy seems, however, to have been slow (only one copy, in the Carmelite house at Ghent, has been recorded north of the Alps) until Mantuan revised and had the col- lection printed in September of 1498-almost two years after the composition of Erasmus' letter. Chronologically, Erasmus could have known Mantuan's eclogues in 1496. In practical terms, it is unlikely that he did. Indeed, none of the references to Mantuan in Erasmus' correspondence suggests that he was referring to-or had even read-the Adulescentia. Quite the contrary: an effusive letter to his patroness, Anna van Borssele, written early in 1501, clearly indicates that, rather than the eclogues, the work by Mantuan that Erasmus knew well was his religious epic Parthenice Mariana. Here he men- tions that Anna's namesake, the mother of the Virgin Mary, had been celebrated by the Italian poet (Allen 145, lines 10-l; CWE 2:12-13), but there is no poem on St. Anne among Mantuan's surviving works, and Erasmus is doubtless thinking of the praise of her in the first book of the epic. A note to the Alsatian humanist Jakob Wimpfeling in 1516 suggests the range of Erasmus' interests in Mantuan's verse: "Witz's opinion surprises me. I must say, whoever it was who persuaded him to take that line, he was a perfect idiot. I would rather have half a line of Mantuanus than thirty thousand by Marullus" (CWE 3:225; Allen 385, lines 3-6). Wimpfeling had been editing Mantuan's De sacris diebus (a sequence of poems, in imitation of Ovid's Fasti, on the feast days of the Church year) for publication as a school text, and ap- parently during this time the schoolmaster Johann Witz (Johannes Sapidus) expressed a preference for the poetry of Michael Marullus. In the prefatory .

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