Latin Pastoral Poetry

A definitive edition of Renaissance pastoral poems by two master poets, including works that inspired Raphael and Shakespeare.

Andrea Navagero (1483–1529) was among the principal poets of the Venetian Renaissance. Famous as the editor of classical texts for Aldus Manutius's celebrated press, Navagero also pioneered the Renaissance pastoral epigram genre. Modeled on the pastoral collections of Theocritus and Vergil and the poems of the Greek Anthology, Navagero's lusus pastorales conjure an idealized rural landscape of shepherds and farmers, hunters and lovers, nymphs, springs, sylvan retreats, and the mingling of the human and the divine. The artists Titian and Raphael took inspiration from his evocations of art and nature, and his verse was imitated by Ronsard, Du Bellay, and Shakespeare.

Marcantonio Flaminio (1498–1550), though now better known for his controversially reformist religious writings, began his career as a Latin poet. Greatly influenced by Navagero and by the Neapolitan humanist Jacopo Sannazaro, Flaminio wrote odes, eclogues, epigrams, and elegies. He later abandoned "light" subjects for weightier themes, but his pastoral epigrams remain some of his most beloved poems and were regularly anthologized during the Renaissance by editors keen to show that modern poets could rival, and even surpass, the ancients.

This volume contains the first complete edition and English translation of Navagero's pastoral poems and is the first to combine them with Flaminio's poetry alongside authoritative Latin texts.