The Oxford Handbook of Neo-Latin

AMAT Satyra ironias: etenim clam, et sub specie laudantis, cum risu mordere consuevit. Gaudet argumentorum varietate (“Satire loves irony, for it is wont to bite surreptitiously, whilst laughing and under the guise of praise. It delights in a variety of subject matter”), declared the Salamancan professor Juan González de Dios in 1739, in his commentary on the book of four Latin satires by his contemporary Francisco Botello de Moraes y Vasconcelos (1670–1747; Botello de Moraes y Vasconcelos 1739, 20). González continued with a summary of the criteria by which Latin (verse) satire should be judged:

In Satyra laudatur ingeniosa inventio, frequens et acuta sententia, vis et acrimonia: dicendi acumen, facetiae, urbanitates. In verbis expetitur proprietas, et elegantia: in versibus apta compositio, in acerbitate iocus. Satyra denique neque scurrilia, neque plebeia, neque obscoena quandoque verba reformidat.

In satire we praise clever topics, numerous pithy expressions, force and animosity. We seek out appropriate and elegant wording, skilled verse composition, tartness delivered with humour. Finally, from time to time satire does not shun scurrilous, vulgar, or even obscene terminology.

By Botello and González’s time, Neo-Latin satire could already draw on a rich, if chequered, tradition. Neo-Latin satire was admittedly closely identified with Botello’s chosen genre, known as “formal verse satire” or sermo, a poem in dactylic hexameters, modeled on the form favored by the Roman satirist Lucilius (ca. 180–102 BCE; hence also, and perhaps preferably, “Lucilian satire”), but for which Horace, Juvenal, and (in Botello’s case) Persius provided the leading examples, often in some combined form but with shifting emphases according to the poet’s preference (Pozuelo Calero 1994; Simons 2013).

However, Neo-Latin satire also manifests itself strongly as Menippean satire. Not formally defined as such in antiquity, this genre took its name from Varro’s Saturae Menippeae (first century BCE), of which only titles and fragments survive, but which were known to mix prose with verse (hence also “prosimetric” or “Varronian satire”). The Menippean satire or Menippea has furthermore been linked to the reception of the equally lacerated, prosimetric Satyricon of Petronius (first century CE), the—much earlier—influence of Lucian’s (second century CE) seriocomic stance (notably in satirical dialogues and the paradoxical encomium), and the medieval carnival, although scholars still debate just how flexible the category of Menippean satire should be (see the differing views of Blanchard 1995, De Smet 1996, or Weinbrot 2005). Last but not least, satire in its broadest, modern meaning of the use of sarcasm, irony, mimicry, scorn, and so on, to expose all kinds of vice, impropriety, foolishness, or evil, was as widespread and diverse in Neo-Latin as it was in vernacular literary traditions.

HESITANT BEGINNINGS: “SATYRA QUID?” (“WHAT IS SATIRE?”)

If Horace, Persius, and Juvenal had been popular school texts during the Middle Ages, they were usually valued more as ethical writers (ethici) than as generic models; moreover, the Middle Ages applied the term satyra or satura rather freely, to poems in elegiac distichs or other meters, as well as to prose works. The Renaissance notion of satire thus started from a position of uncertainty: from the first humanist commentaries on the classical satirists onwards, such as Giovanni Britannico of Brescia’s annotated edition of Persius (1481) or the assembled praenotamenta (“preliminary remarks”) on all three Roman satirists in Josse Bade’s commentary on Horace of 1500 (Debailly 2001), much ink flowed in the debate over the etymology and nature of satura, a variant spelling of satira, now believed to refer originally to “a mixture,” “hodgepodge” or “farrago.” Typically, humanists discerned between Lucilian or formal verse satire, on one hand, and an older, mixed form, which gradually came to be associated with Menippean satire, on the other. In addition, the misspelling of satura as satyra famously invited association with “satyrs,” the petulant and uncouth hybrid woodland creatures of Greek mythology, and thus also with Greek satyr-plays (which the Renaissance not only linked to the coarse, extemporized “Atellan play” of ancient Italy, the fabula Atellana, but also compared to the French soties, morality plays and farces). Indeed, in Neo-Latin, the noun satyrus can also refer to “the satirist.” The humanists’ early attempts to reconcile the classical source material, however, remained largely inconclusive; rarely did they result in effective yardsticks for new productions. González’s criteria, quoted earlier, thus usefully complement, say, Julius Caesar Scaliger’s summation of satire as “a poem that is frank like the temperament of the satyrs and turns everything topsy-turvy, for the sake of a clever word. Therefore it needs neither introduction nor epilogue” (Scaliger 1994, 186; my translation). Meanwhile, the tripartite division of dramatic, isometric (with hexameter lines of equal length), and prosimetric satire also formed part of Daniel Heinsius’s definition of the genre in his commentary on Horace’s satires (1612). Modeling his concept on Aristotle’s famous definition of tragedy, Heinsius specified, moreover, that satire’s combination of serious or vituperative intent with a style that varied from being simple and informal to harsh, sharp, or humorous and witty stirred emotive reactions of hatred, indignation, or laughter (De Smet 1996, 50).

Unsurprisingly, Neo-Latin authors sometimes applied the term satyra loosely, if not as a misnomer. The young Erasmus, for instance, named some of his early poems satirae before changing each of their titles to elegia, and seems not to have had a clear understanding of the sermo (Tournoy 1994, 99). Alternatively in 1607, Antonio Cerri, a little known humanist from Rimini, defined satyra “over and above its usual acceptation” (praeter tritam notionem) as “just an accusatory way of speaking” (satyram solum esse maledicum dicendi genus), which he conceded was often mixed in nature. Cerri’s Satyrarum scholasticarum centuriae duae (Two Hundreds of Scholastic Satires), in which this explanation occurs (Cerri 1607, centuria prima, 1r), consists of two sets of miscellaneous, if sharply critical, remarks in prose, that other humanists might have called lucubrationes (“nocturnal studies”). Likewise, the Satyrae medicae (Medical Satires, 1722) by Georg Franck von Franckenau (1643–1704) are not poetic, but contain the physician’s sundry notes made during his extensive reading (Kivistö 2007). Somewhat more conformist is the late seventeenth-century chemist from Poitiers Just Bonin, who catered to his contemporaries’ taste for pithy expression by parodying the medical profession’s therapeutic principles in just twenty aphorisms, collectively labeled as a Satyra in medicos quosdam de trivio (Satire on the Three Basic Remedies, against Some Doctors; in Nicolas de Blégny’s Zodiacus Medico-Gallicus [French Medical Zodiac, 1680]).

Although the Hellenist Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614) settled the etymological question in his authoritative De satyrica Graecorum poesi et Romanorum satira (On the Greek Satyr-Play and Roman Satire; 1605), goat-legged satyrs continued to form a popular motif on the illustrated title-pages of editions of both ancient and Neo-Latin satirical texts. The spurious explanation of satire’s “satyr-like” origins was rehearsed until well into the eighteenth century, providing a seemingly authoritative justification for any bawdy content. Other enduring emblems of satire were the mirror (calling for self-knowledge), a lifted or torn-off mask (condemning hypocrisy), and the fool’s cap (a sign that the satirist’s irreverence must be endured, if not indulged).

Despite the widespread poetological comments, then, the Neo-Latins’ actual writerly practice very much depended on a deliberate imitation of both ancient and more recent models: verbal, titular, and thematic echoes served as a self-imposed genetic imprint to create family resemblances that, as much as any formal traits, marked out a text as a particular type of satire. As for the satyr-play, Euripides’s Cyclops (fifth century BCE) was, and is, the only fully extant example of its kind; notwithstanding some sixteenth-century experimentation with dramatic “satyr” in French or Italian such as Giambattista Cinzio’s Egle (1545), the Cyclops itself did not yield any notable imitations, other than Florent Chrestien’s Latin verse translation, published in 1605.

FORMAL VERSE SATIRE

The first verse satires emerged from the humanist milieu in northern and central Italy. An early witness was a satirical fragment (satyra) by Zanobi da Strada (d. 1361), criticizing a lawyer. In the fifteenth century, Gregorio Correr, Giovanni Michele Alberto Carrara, Gaspare Tribraco, and Lorenzo Lippi da Colle all left manuscript satires, published only in the twentieth century (Carrara 1967 and 1987; Correr 1973; Tribraco 1972; Lippi da Colle 1978). Better known are Francesco Filelfo’s Satirarum hecatostichon decades decem (Ten Decades of Satires of Hundred Lines), ten books, each consisting of ten satires of precisely one hundred lines in length. Written between 1428 and 1448, they reflect the humanist’s peregrinations from Florence to Siena, Bologna, and Milan. The complete set is preserved in eight principal manuscripts, with numerous others containing selections, whilst the first “decade” was printed in Milan in 1476 (Filelfo 2005). The collection’s fanciful symmetry seems to go against the grain of the disorder associated with a hodgepodge genre. However, the satires cover various polemics; the opinions expressed in them are far from being in unison; and the tone ranges from virulent invective to a more poised, didactic stance. Although in 1503 the Modenese schoolteacher Francesco Rococciolo (ca. 1470–1528) only explicitly named Tribraco as a recent satirist in his Satyrus (a verse commentary on Juvenal; Haye 2008, 278–79), Filelfo was the only one of these early poets to exercise some enduring influence, even outside Italy; from the middle of the sixteenth century onward, however, his satires slipped into oblivion.

Also noteworthy are the two books of ten and twelve sermones, respectively, in Giovanni Aurelio Augurelli’s collected poems of 1505; an earlier version survives in manuscript (Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Mellon MS 22). Augurelli (ca. 1456–1524) deliberately advocated a soft, Horatian approach to satire, preferring “gentle laughter” (levi risu) over outright, personalized denunciation (1505, 48b). A similar, gentle tone is evident in Tito Vespasiano Strozzi’s sermones, published posthumously in Strozzi and his son’s collected poetry (1513). If both Augurelli and Strozzi were criticized for their satires’ lack of bite or bile (Simons 2013, 143), their approach heralded a strand of poetically accomplished, but rather toothless, moralizing verse that persisted until the eighteenth century.

More satirists emerged in the 1530s: the Two Satires (Satyre due, 1536) by the Paduan reformer Pietro Cittadella have yet to be investigated. The Sermones by the Ragusan Damjan Benešić (Damianus Benessa, 1477–1539), who enjoyed close ties with Italian humanist circles, remained in manuscript (Dubrovnik, Biblioteka Samostana Male Braće, MS 78, written before 1539). However, in 1531–32, the Neapolitan poet Giano Anisio (Ianus Anysius, ca. 1472–ca. 1540) published six books of verse satires (containing some fifty pieces in all, of varying length) as the second volume of his Varia poemata et satyrae (Various Poems and Satires). Anisio claimed that he had been composing satires from boyhood—ever since Juvenal (1.30: difficile est saturam non scribere [“it is difficult not to write satire”]), the satirical impulse was construed as irrepressible—and that he was the first to reintroduce satire to his homeland since antiquity (1531, 3r; 1532, fols. 75r, 76r). Mostly Anisio took a moderate attitude: “it is not safe to poke at every hole” (Omnia non digito explorare foramina tutum est; 1532, 26r). With nearly each satire addressing a different individual—Christ, popes Julius II and Leo X, several cardinals, poets such as his fellow Neapolitan Jacopo Sannazaro (1458–1530), two of the poet’s brothers, and so on—the collection offers great insight into the satirist’s milieu.

From the 1540s, Latin verse satire experienced a lull among the Italians: bar some exceptions such as the three admonishing sermones that Girolamo Faletti addressed to the young Alfonso II d’Este (Sacré 1992, 205), we have to wait for the Jesuit Giovanni Lorenzo Lucchesini (1638–ca. 1710) to berate various faultfinders as well as the corruption of youth in his Specimen didascalici carminis et satyrae (Showcase of Didactic Poetry, and Satires, 1672). Two decades later, the Roman official Lodovico Sergardi (1660–1726) directed his Juvenalian wrath against a fellow member of the Academy of Arcadia, Gian Vincenzo Gravina. Another late practitioner was the Ragusan nobleman Junije Antonio Restić (Junius de Restiis, 1755–1814), whose twenty-five verse satires appeared at Padua in the posthumous edition of Restić’s Carmina (Poems, 1816).

Developments in Quattrocento Italy, in terms of editions of ancient satires and the first circulation in print of Filelfo’s hecatosticha, encouraged an early spate of satire production in the Low Countries. The region was, moreover, characterized by a particularly strong humanistic interest in moral literature, which brought Persius and Horace to the fore—though less so Juvenal, thought to be obscene (Tournoy 1998). Following in the footsteps of Petrus Montanus (1467/8–1507), whose “twelve” (in fact eleven) satires appeared between 1501 and 1507, with part of the missing ninth published in 1529, Gerard Geldenhouwer (Gerardus Noviomagus, 1482–1542) addressed eight satires to “the truly religious” (ad verae religionis cultores; 1515), targeting ungodly priests and monks. In the 1540s and early 1550s, the historian and schoolmaster Lambertus Hortensius (1518–73) produced several “biting” satires, eight of which were published at Utrecht in 1552; a second, partial book of satires containing a further eight satyrae, numbered 5–13, survives in manuscript (Universiteitsbibliotheek Utrecht, MS 828). The Leiden statesman Janus Dousa the Elder (1545–1604) attacked his former friend “Fannius” (the German scholar Obertus Giphanius) for his alleged intentions to plagiarize in two satires, published in Dousa’s début collection of poetry of 1569 (Heesakkers and Reinders 1993, 21–27). By the 1609 edition, however, Dousa’s satires had increased to eight and dealt with a broader range of subjects, though some of them were evidently left unfinished. Jan van Havre’s Arx virtutis (Fortress of Virtue, 1627; Laureys 2008), and the stern Sermones familiares (Familiar Satires) by the Antwerp magistrate Pieter Scholier (Petrus Scholirius, 1582–1635) reveal once more a moralistic tendency. Remarkably, Scholier’s satires were assembled under the title Diogenes Cynicus (Diogenes the Cynic, 1635), a figure more often associated with the outlook of Menippean satire than with its Lucilian counterpart. Indeed, in the 1683 edition, with its extensive commentary by Albert Le Roy (1683), the satirist’s portrait is tellingly flanked by the goddess of wisdom, Athena, and the scornful Cynic. In the Enlightenment, the Dutch physician Gerhard Nicolaas Heerkens (1726–1801) composed, whilst still a youth, four Latin satires, published in 1746 under the pseudonym “Curillus”; a later edition, in 1758, contained a further three satires (Haskell 2013).

Meanwhile, in the mid-sixteenth century, the Bavarian-born reformer Thomas Naogeorgus (1508–63) placed his Satyrae (1555) in the wake of Filelfo as well as the classical canon, claiming (not quite accurately!) that the satirical genre was hardly known or practiced in the German-speaking regions and that it generally suffered from a bad reputation for being offensive, brazen, and immodest. In the following decade, the Tübingen professor Nicodemus Frischlin (1547–90) launched eight satires against the Catholic convert Jacob Rabe (published in 1607). His contemporary Hannard van Gameren (Gamerius), who taught Greek at Ingolstadt, before moving to Tongeren and Harderwijk, supported the Lutherans’ cause in his Two Satires (Satyrae duae), published first without an indication of year or place (possibly at Antwerp), and then at Munich in 1568. Probably the best-known German exponent of Neo-Latin verse satire is the Jesuit Jakob Balde (1604–68), whose nimble pen sang, amongst others, The Glory of Medicine (Medicinae gloria) and derided the emaciated appearance of philosophers (Freyburger, Lefèvre, and Schilling 2005).

The French no doubt also benefited from Filelfo, whose satires were reprinted in Paris in 1508 and 1518. Augurelli’s sermones likewise circulated in France, but in a letter to Cardinal Du Bellay of 1547–1548, Salmon Macrin belittled Augurelli’s supposed Horatian stance, which he thought strayed too far from its model (Scheurer and Petris 2008, 443). Among French Neo-Latin satirists feature the eminent names of Marc-Antoine Muret; Etienne de la Boétie, who addressed a lengthy verse satire to his friend Michel de Montaigne; and Chancellor Michel de L’Hospital, as well as occasional poets such as the physician Bonaventure Grangier. The expatriate Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484–1558), who was equally critical of Augurelli (Thurn 2008, 262), composed an unusual series of Teretismata (Twitterings), which appeared in his posthumous Poems from 1574 onwards. The first of these is a “satyra” that ironically questions the usefulness of writing in a world of depravity; then follow (partly autobiographical) pieces entitled Poeta (Poet), Medicus (Doctor), Ego (I), Conviva (Table Companion), Pater (Father), Otium (Leisure), and lastly Machla, a virulent satire on “a wanton woman.”

On the Iberian peninsula, Botello had three significant precursors. The posthumous Poetic Works (Opera poetica, 1600) of Jaime Juan Falcó (1522–1594) contain nine formal verse satires: two attack gamblers (aleatores), whilst others target jurisprudents and the weaknesses of the law court—all of this mixed with moralist musings about contentment, the prevalence of man’s soul, or the different stages in life. Curiously, Falcó also experimented with prosody: his seventh satire deliberately emulated Horace’s first satire, but with each single line beginning and ending with a monosyllabic word. The three sermones, on the other hand, of Hernán Ruiz de Villegas (ca. 1510–after 1571), a former student of Vives at Leuven, remained in manuscript with the rest of his Latin poetry until 1734. The third representative is Francisco Pacheco (ca. 1540–1599), a canon from southern Spain, whose moralizing Sermones date from 1572–1573.

Elsewhere, it is harder to detect strong regional traditions. The British Isles, for instance, were not short of satirists, but verse satire adhered less closely to the classical canon. George Buchanan, famous for his anti-monastic Franciscanus (The Franciscan, composed in the 1530s), nonetheless left a Satire against the Cardinal of Lorraine (Satyra in Carolum Lotharingium Cardinalem), written in the wake of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572). In the next century, however, the Scot William Hog or Hogg (Gulielmus Hogaeus, ca. 1655–ca. 1702), translator of Milton, combined the popular exercise of a poetic paraphrase of the Old Testament Book of Ecclesiastes with the reproof of satire for his Satyra sacra vanitatem [sic] mundi et rerum humanarum (Sacred Satire on the Vanities of the World and Human Affairs, 1685). Last but not least, let us mention the Polish nobleman Antoni Poniński, whose Sarmatides (alluding to the ancient Sarmatians as the ancestors of the Poles), published under the pen name Jan Maximilian Krolikiewicz in 1741, expound on “nature,” “religion,” “education,” “Polish affairs” and so on.

MENIPPEAN SATIRE

Alongside verse satire, polemicists found a versatile vehicle for reprehension and exposure in Menippean satire. Given the fragmented transmission of Varro, the Flemish humanist Justus Lipsius turned to Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis (The “Gourdification” [of the Divine Claudius], 54 CE; the only example of this Varronian strand to survive more or less intact) as a model for his Satyra Menippea: somnium, sive lusus in nostri aevi criticos (A Menippean Satire: The Dream, or Mockery of Contemporary Critics, 1581), an attack on careless and unfounded interventions in textual criticism. Lipsius cast his satire as a dream set in ancient Rome, during which the narrator witnesses a senatorial debate featuring both ancient and more contemporary figures. The Somnium inspired a host of oneiric satires: in his acrimonious scuffle with the Catholic pamphleteer Kaspar Schoppe, for example, the Protestant Joseph Scaliger could count, not only on Daniel Heinsius’s Hercules tuam fidem (By Hercules!, 1608) and Virgula divina (Magic Wand, 1609), but also on Caspar Barth’s Cave canem (Beware of the Dog!, 1612) to defend his name. Other examples include Nicolas Rigault’s Funus parasiticum (Parasite’s Funeral, 1596–1601), Petrus Cunaeus’s Sardi Venales (Sardinians for Sale [a proverbial tag meaning “worthless people”], 1612), and the anonymous Monmori Parasitosycophantosophistae Apochytrapotheôsis (Casserolideification of Montmaur the parasite, sycophant and sophist, ca. 1643).

In its longer incarnation, supposedly imitating Petronius’s Satyricon, prosimetric satire allied itself closely with the novel, finding vernacular equivalents in the Spanish picaresque or the French roman comique (De Smet 1996; IJsewijn 1999): typically, a rather naïve protagonist finds himself wrapped up in a series of outlandish or quotidian adventures, which allow for humorous (and amorous) encounters, candid observation, the sampling of different philosophies, and much social criticism. If modern-day classical scholars question the wisdom of linking Petronius to the protean Menippea, it is important to remember that humanists considered the Satyricon a veiled anatomy of Nero’s time. The principal innovator of the genre, John Barclay, and his detractors certainly thought of his Euphormionis Lusinini satyricon (The Satire of Euphormio from Lusinia 1605–1607) as a satire, in which doctors, venal aristocrats, and the Jesuits, portrayed as the servants of “Acignius” (an anagram of “Ignatius [Ignacius]” of Loyola), run the gauntlet. Barclay’s followers include the Gaeomemphionis Cantaliensis satyricon (Satire of the Critic of the World from the Cantal, 1628), attributed to François Guyet, the Satyricon in corruptae iuventutis mores corruptos (Satire Against the Corrupt Morals of the Young, 1631) by Leiden’s maverick professor Jan Bodecher Benningh (who also wrote verse satires), and the Misoponeri satyricon (Satire of the Hater of Evil, 1617) attributed to Casaubon (1617). Noteworthy is also the Eudemia (Land of the Good People, 1637, enlarged 1647), partly modeled on Thomas More’s Utopia, in which Gian Vittorio Rossi (Ianus Nicius Erythraeus) paints a detailed, if rather disjointed, portrait of Rome under the papacy of Urban VIII.

FLUID BOUNDARIES: OTHER FORMS OF SATIRIC WRITING

It is already amply clear that both isometric and prosimetric satire had fluid boundaries. The satirical spirit can certainly be found in other genres, such as the epigram, the pasquinade, mock-didactic verse (such as Friedrich Dedekind’s Grobianus [Boor] of 1549), or joke collections such as the Facetiae facetiarum (The Jokes of Jokes, 1615) and Nugae venales (Jokes for Sale, 1642). Also popular is the epistolary form, as in Ulrich von Hutten’s famous Letters of Obscure Men (Kivistö 2002; Bowen 2006), Théodore de Bèze’s Epistola magistri Passavantii (The Letter of Magister Passavant, 1553; de Bèze 2004), or indeed some of the Greek verse epistles by Filelfo (Robin 1984). Several of Filelfo’s satires are, moreover, conceived of as poetic letters, as was indeed Restić’s tenth satyra, perpetuating the close ties between the two genres, that Pomponius Porphyrio (second-third century CE) already discerned in his scholia on Horace. Even Casaubon declared that “one should not tolerate those who think that [Horace’s] books of letters ought to be excluded from the designation and number of satires” (Ferendi non sunt, qui epistolarum libros satirarum appellatione ac numero censerint excludendos), adding that even Lucilius had cast some of his satires as letters (Casaubon 1605, 292). Thus Pacheco’s Sermones veer—despite their sermones label—between Juvenalian satire and Horatian epistle (Pozuelo Calero 1993 and 2000). Other examples where the distinction is blurred are Nathan Chytraeus’s Epistola satyrica contra pestem (Satirical Letter against the Plague, 1578) and, above all, L’Hospital’s posthumous Epistolae seu sermones (Letters, or Satires, 1585).

In the wake of their ancient models, verse satires often featured short dialogic exchanges between the poet and his reader or an imaginary adversary; some satirists, such as William King in his Sermo pedestris (Pedestrian Conversation/Satire, 1739), would exploit verse dialogue in full. Well before then, however, the rediscovery and Latin translations of Lucian produced a wealth of satirical dialogues in prose or prosimetrum, which have been well studied (Marsh 1998; Robinson 1979). Leon Battista Alberti’s Momus (Blame, the name of the fault-finding protagonist, 1440s), with its exuberant plot and veiled allusions to the papacy of Eugene IV, is one of the best-known examples of this burgeoning trend, which also includes Giovanni Pontano’s Asinus (The Ass, ca. 1488) and Charon (1467), or Willibald Pirckheimer’s Eccius Dedolatus (Eck Planed Down, 1520), debunking Luther’s opponent, the theologian Johannes Eck.

Neo-Latin satire also enjoyed close links with oratory. This is evident in the paradoxical encomium, which again relates to the Lucianic tradition, and of which Erasmus’s Praise of Folly (1511) is the prime exponent: others wrote eulogies of animals such as the fly, ant, or ass; body parts such as the foot; and physical conditions or ailments such as gout, drunkenness, or fever—many of which were conveniently collected in Caspar Dornau’s Amphitheatrum sapientiae Socraticae ioco-seriae (Amphitheater of Seriocomic Socratic Wisdom, 1619). Occasionally, humanists such as Juan Luis Vives, Petrus Nannius, or Francesco Benci took recourse to the Menippean mode for a public address, mostly in an academic context.

There is arguably kinship between satire and cento-writing; that is, the composition of a new poem by rearranging verse fragments from a chosen author (e.g., Homer, Virgil, Petrarch), because of the cento’s inherent wit and parody, not to mention its jumbled nature. Few self-confessed satirists, however, truly experimented with this form, possibly because the Roman satirists’ restricted number of lines did not offer sufficient scope for scrambled writing; still, Janus Dousa rose to the challenge with his Centones aliquot Luciliani (Some Lucilian Centos, 1597). Miscellaneous borrowings, however, are common, especially in Menippean satire, where theorists debated whether the poetic element of the prosimetric narrative ought to be original or not. The Mercurius: satyra sive somnium (Mercury: Satire, or Dream, 1618) by the Florentine Balduino de Monte Simoncelli actually indicated its sources in the margins, as many centos did. Later, Johan Bergenhielm (1629–1704) explicitly turned to the patchwork form for his Cento satyricus in hodiernos motus septentrionis concinnatus (A Satirical Cento on the Present-Day Disturbances in the North, 1700; Aili 1994). The pamphlet, which relates to the Great Northern War (1700–21), draws on (unacknowledged) prose and verse quotations from a broad range of authors; moreover, it takes the form of a play, not adhering at all to the traditional isometric manifestations of the cento form, but perhaps harking back to the elusive notion of dramatic satire.

Finally, macaronic poetry too, with its characteristic mix of languages, lent itself well to parodic and satirical purposes. Often using Latin (or dog Latin) as one of its components, macaronic poetry entered humanist culture in Northern Italy in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries with Tifi Odasi (Odaxius, 1451–1492) and Teofilo Folengo (1491–1544), writing under the pseudonym “Merlinus Coccaius.” However, it also found practitioners in other language areas. Thus Rémy Belleau’s Dictamen metrificum, sive de bello Huguenotico (Versified Writing; or, On the Huguenot War, ca. 1562–1567) denounced the raiding bands of mercenaries tearing through France during the Wars of Religion. Prose or prosimetric equivalents include the Themata medica de beanorum, archibeanorum, beanulorum et cornutorum quorumcunque affectibus et curatione (Medical Topics on the Sufferings and Curation of Any Greenhorns, Arch-Greenhorns, Baby-Greenhorns, and the Horned, 1626), a mock-medical treatise, no doubt authored by some German students, on the “ailments” befalling university freshmen or greenhorns (beani or bejauni, derived from the French bec-jaune [“yellow beak”] or, in German, Gehörnte [“horned ones”]).

“WHATEVER HUMANS DO . . . FORMS THE STUFFING OF OUR LITTLE BOOK”

Conscious of Juvenal 1.85–86 (Quicquid agunt homines … nostri libelli farrago est), Neo-Latin satirists took issue with the full range of shortcomings in human society: avarice, ambition, extravagance, and the many incommodities in life were readily carped at, whether as single topics or as part of a gamut of moral decay. Thus, the Bohemian scholar and poet Bohuslav Lobkowicz von Hassenstein (1462–1510), who had been educated in Italy, denounced the sinking mores of the Bohemian aristocracy and people in his Ad Sanctum Venceslaum Satira (Satire to St. Wenceslas). The anonymous Menippean Virtus vindicata, sive Polieni Rhodiensis satyra (Virtue Vindicated, or Satire of Polienus from Rhodes, 1617) even took on “the depravity of the world’s inhabitants” (in depravatos orbis incolas). In this, the satirist’s outlook is variably that of a bewildered or amused observer, a belligerent champion of virtue, or a censorious judge who would like to distance himself from the theater of the world; yet he often finds himself a reluctant participant, compelled to admonish and correct.

Since Neo-Latin authors often prided themselves on their erudition, linguistic ability, and good judgement, attacks on ignorance and hollow displays of learning were also common. Thus, in the second of Antonio Codro Urceo’s (1446–1500) two verse satires, the poet admits that his railing against ignorance might make him hateful, yet he feels compelled to write his satire (coactus/haec scribo): sheer indignation makes the Neo-Latin satirist break silence, just as it did his ancient precursor. Developing an idea already present in Horace (Epistles 2.1.117) and Juvenal (1.1–18), satirists eagerly targeted scribblers and penny poets: witness Pierio Valeriano’s De studiorum conditione sermo (Satire on the Condition of Studies), published in his Praeludia (Preludes, 1509); Montanus’s eighth satire De poetis (On Poets); Falcó’s second satire In malos poetas (Against Bad Poets); or the anonymous Satyra in poetastros O-c-enses (Satire against the O-c—ian Poetasters, 1702), disparaging the poems on the death of William III and the succession of Queen Anne.

The imperative of imitation and the broad moral concern with virtue or happiness, however, did not stop Neo-Latin hecklers from exposing problems that were specific to their age: previous examples have already shown that, unsurprisingly, ecclesiastical misconduct and confessional differences are strongly present in Neo-Latin satire, on either the Protestant or the Catholic side. Pacheco, in a short but striking passage of his first Sermo (1.127–35), denounces slavery and the cruel torture that maintains it, whilst Balde decries excessive smoking (to which he himself was prone) in his Satyra contra abusum tabaci (Satire Against the Abuse of Tobacco). Nationalist traits, too, were grist to the satirist’s mill. Around 1500, the Dutchman Kempo Thessaliensis, who studied in Paris for a while, denounced the scams of French tradesmen in his De dolis Gallorum satyra (Satire on the Tricks of the French, 1500) before inciting the French to a more virtuous life (Tournoy 1994, 107–8). In 1630–1636, Johann Lauremberg complained in his lengthy and multifaceted Satyra qua rerum bonarum abusus et vitia quaedam seculi perstringuntur (A Satire Surveying the Abuses of Good Things and Certain Contemporary Vices) about the encompassing vogue of all things French, whether it concerned affectation in language or in attitude (the préciosité emerging from witty seventeenth-century salon culture), clothing, or other pernicious customs, such as dueling (Lauremberg 1861, 91). And Heerkens weighed the respective merits (and demerits) of Paris and Frisia in his Satyra de moribus Parhisiorum et Frisiae (Satire on the Customs of the Parisians and of Frisia, 1750), once again at a time when the Dutch thought French was very much à la mode (Haskell 2013, 235).

We have already seen that the medical sphere likewise caused its fair share of ruffled feathers: attacks against incompetent doctors go back at least to medieval times. However, what particularly appealed to early modern satirists was the restorative concept of poetry, whereby the satirist is construed as an “anatomist,” cutting, cauterizing, purging, and occasionally offering a sweetened pill in order to heal society, a notion that led to the frequent use of medical meta-language (Kivistö 2002). Yet therapeutic satire can slide into wounding invective: the De morborum generibus (On the Kinds of Illnesses) taken from a satyra imprecatoria (“cursing satire”) by Montanus and published in the Strasbourg edition of Baptista Fiera’s Coena de herbarum virtutibus (Dinner, on the Virtues of Herbs, 1529), is a virtuosic listing of all the illnesses the poet wishes upon greedy tax collectors.

Predictably, Neo-Latin satire is an overwhelmingly male affair. Despite the rediscovery in 1493 of a verse satire, which was wrongly ascribed to Sulpicia, the poetess of Pliny’s day, but which the Renaissance thought genuine (Stevenson 2005, 558), the early modern period produced no satirists of note among its already scant female Neo-Latin writers, even if some of their vernacular counterparts (such as Louise Labé, Arcangela Tarabotti, Margaret Cavendish, or Madame Deshoulières) are now valued for their satirical wit. Nonetheless, it was said of Ann Baynard (1672–1697) that “having an eye to the saying of that Great Poet, Semper ego Auditor tantum [“Am I to be only a listener all my days?” Juvenal 1.1], she set herself to the Composing of many things in the Latine Tongue, which were rare and useful in their kind” (Prude 1697, 25), and indeed that she composed “some severe satyrs in the Latin Toung” (Stevenson 2005, 381–82; Cowper ca. 1700–1710, 193). Sadly, Baynard’s writings are lost. Conversely, satirists viewed women themselves with great suspicion or according to stereotypes, as they did the institution of marriage: in the mid-fifteenth century, for instance, Cristoforo da Fano inveighed in one of his satyrulae (Little Satires, ca. 1455–1460) against “the many men who in marrying a woman consider only her beauty or the size of her dowry” (Satyrula contra multos qui in ducenda uxore solam formam consyderant aut dotis quantitatem); the Humiliati friar took inspiration from Juvenal’s notorious misogynist sixth satire, but also from Jerome’s treatise Against Jovinian (393 CE, advocating virginity and asceticism; Piacentini 2007).

This leaves the question of Latin and the vernacular. While critics have long shown that Neo-Latin and vernacular satire often developed in parallel or shared analogous concerns (Pagrot 1961; Hess 1971; Blanchard 1995), the cross-fertilization between the two is not yet fully understood. Neo-Latin verse satire certainly inspired few translations or adaptations, compared to Horace, Persius, or Juvenal, which from the sixteenth century onwards were much more readily rendered or emulated (the notions often overlap): in Italian by Ludovico Ariosto; in Spanish by Jerónimo de Villegas; in Dutch by Cornelis van Ghistele and “Emilius Elmeguidi” (Guilelmus de Mey [Ter Meer 1983]); in French by Mathurin Régnier, Vauquelin de La Fresnaye, or Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux; in English by Thomas Drant, Barten Holyday, or John Dryden—the list is woefully inadequate. Only from the late seventeenth century do sparse vernacular versions of Neo-Latin verse satire emerge: Sigmund von Birken’s Die truckene Trunkenheit (The Dry Drunkenness, 1658) modeled itself on Balde’s anti-tobacco satire. Another instance is Santolius vindicatus (1696), a poem by the Jesuit Jean-Antoine du Cerceau ridiculing Jean-Baptiste de Santeuil’s inordinate pride in his Latinity, which du Cerceau himself “translated” as Santeuil vengé (Santeuil Vindicated). The original, however, is not a regular sermo, but alternates octosyllabic and dodecasyllabic verse. Similarly, in 1743, William Major appears to have been both the anonymous translator (“a Gentleman, Late of Balliol College Oxford”) and hidden author of the Four Satires (Satyrae Quatuor), published in London in 1735 under the initials “D. G.” and subsequently presented as a recently deceased “Native of Holland.” Major’s Latin satires, too, are irregular, since he uses elegiac couplets rather than just hexameters. More conventional is Girolamo Pallini’s anonymous transposition, in the second half of the eighteenth century, of eight of Quinto Settano’s (i.e., Sergardi’s) satires in terza rima. The precedence and relative innocuousness of the classical texts, as well as the short-lived topical interest of many Neo-Latin satires, and a high degree of allusiveness and intertextual play, which sometimes descended into deliberate obscurity, are perhaps to blame for this meager traffic from Neo-Latin verse into the vernacular. Moreover, Neo-Latin mostly involves a deliberate linguistic choice. Evidently, some satirists also tested their bite in their mother tongue: Pacheco, for instance, penned a Spanish Sátira contra la mala poesía (Satire Against Bad Poetry) which survived in several manuscripts (Montera Delgado 1993).

There was greater latitude in the case of satirical prose or prosimetrum. The anonymous English “translator” of Lipsius’s Somnium offset his own modest endeavor against that of highly acclaimed interpreters of the classics such as John Dryden in his preface to The Parliament of Criticks in 1702. The anti-Jesuit satire Conclave Ignatii (Ignatius’s Conclave, 1610–1611), attributed to John Donne, appeared almost simultaneously in English (1611); within the next half-century, Ignatius: His Conclave, or His Inthronisation in a Late Election in Hell was reprinted no less than five times. Barclay’s Satyricon knew four French adaptations—by Jean Tournet (1625), Sébastien (or Jean?) Nau (1626), Jean Bérault (1640), and Jean-Baptiste Drouet de Maupertuis (1712–13); in 1683, Nicolaas Jachirides Wieringa produced a Dutch version. The Comus, sive Phagesiposia cimmeria (Comus, or the Cimmerian banquet, 1608) by the Leuven professor Erycius Puteanus gave rise to both a Dutch and a French version, whereas Bergenhielm’s Cento satyricus sparked a version in Swedish verse and a German adaptation (Wittrock 1922).

Conversely, some vernacular satirical works proved so popular that a Latin translation was warranted: the late medieval satire by Sebastian Brant, Das Narrenschiff (The Ship of Fools, 1494), was translated into Latin by Brant’s student Jakob Locher as Navis stultifera (1497). In the Parisian colleges, the satires and epistles of Boileau Despréaux (1636–1711) invited—rather ironically, given Boileau’s dislike of modern Latin writers—various translations into Latin verse by Jean Maury (1669), Antoine Hennegrave (1710), Michel Godeau (1708, 1709, 1737), and Bénigne Grenan (1706), as well as an anonymous work pitting Juvenal rendered into French against a Latinized Boileau (1677; Briesemeister 1985, 209–10). Lastly, Traiano Boccalini’s Ragguagli del Parnaso (Reports from Parnassus, 1612–1613) circulated in various vernacular translations as well as (partially) in Latin.

VEILED UNVEILERS

Satyram scribo, quod solent qui nomen suum nobilitare gaudent (“I write a satire, as those are wont who enjoy glorifying their name”), declared the unidentified author of Amatus Fornacius: amator ineptus (Amatus Fornacius: The Clumsy Lover, 1633), a good-natured lampoon of seventeenth-century social mores emanating no doubt from Leiden University’s student milieu (De Smet 1989). As tongue-in-cheek as the statement is, the satirical vein has indeed inspired some of the most distinguished writers in Neo-Latin literature and humanist scholarship (Alberti, Filelfo, Erasmus, and Lipsius, to recall but a few); many others hid behind a pseudonym. Sobriquets were commonplace for the victims of satire and for toponyms, first, because this was thought to be in line with a number of ancient models; secondly, because of the monikers’ satirical potential; and thirdly, because reprisals were not unthinkable. The satirists’ avowed cautiousness no doubt partially explains why even in the age of print a good number of satires remained in manuscript. Condemnations could be long-lasting. Banned soon after publication, the Menippean satire Nescimus quid vesper serus vehat (Little Do We Know What Late Evening Brings, 1619–1620), written under the alias Vincentius Liberius Hollandus, but ascribed to the Venetian lawyer Niccolò Crasso (De Smet 1996, 201–8), remained on the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books until the Index was abolished in 1966. So did Barclay’s Satyricon. The same Index also listed Nicolas Chorier’s pornographic dialogues, the Satyra sotadica de arcanis amoris et Veneris (Sotadean [alluding to Sotades, an obscene Greek poet of the third century BCE] Satire on the Secrets of Love and Venus, 1660), spuriously published under the name of the poetess Aloysia Sigaea (Luisa Sigea, ca. 1520–60; Martínez de Bujanda 2002, 103, 219, 254). It is ironic, however, that Crasso’s satire, which goes back to the aftermath of the Venetian Interdict (1606–1607) and Venice’s claims to jurisdiction over the Adriatic, contained within it a long section on book censorship: the satirist, after all, is the censors’ censor, locked in a never-ending battle for the freedom to speak, for the greater good of his fellow man, and for the general reparation of society.