This collection of essays focuses on the practices of orality: Latin poetry à la Renaissance. The book contains eight contributions in several languages (French, English, and Italian), and is grouped in three parts: “The School,” “The Roman Model,” and “Sung Latin Poetry.” The work, including an introduction by Aline Smeesters, is marvelously coherent, treating a subject too often neglected by specialists of Latin literature, and offers new and stimulating elements for reflection. Latin poetry, returned to a context of dialogue and reading aloud, regains the vivid character it often loses in analyses that overlook these aspects of recitation and textual reception.
The first part, dedicated to the practice of Latin poetry in an educational setting, reestablishes oral exercises as the core element of the pedagogical method. The three contributions on this subject assemble an inventory of ancient authors who discuss reading aloud, where actio served to emphasize a poem’s most preeminent elements, aided in its memorization, and brought its essential rhythmic and prosodic elements to the fore. Here one is made to see the intimate relation between poetry and rhetoric, with Quintilian’s Institutes of Oratory providing a key framework for the modalities of oral recitation, as transmitted in Jesuit treatises of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In addition to the prominence given to the pronunciation and modulation of texts, these studies bring to light the originality of a corpus composed for this purpose by university professors — among them Ravisius Textor — who participated in the adaptation of Latinity to a young audience, maintaining literary quality while serving a pedagogical end. These three first chapters are extremely enlightening, not only regarding the pedagogy put in place concerning Latin and Neo-Latin literature and the innovations therein, but also regarding the manner in which these texts were diffused, including performances organized for a range of secular and religious audiences.
The second part centers upon the staging of Latin performances in the Rome of Leo X, focusing on two well-known examples. The first is the recitation of grand theatrical pieces organized in 1513 at the pope’s initiative in teatro Capitolino; the second concerns the Prolusiones Academicae de stylo poetico of Famiano Strada, a text that closely examines the performance of poetry. These two contributions enlarge upon the question of the reception of Latin literature by an audience — erudite or popular? — and offers a pair of fascinating illustrations of the renewed vitality of the Latin tongue in a period where vernacular language had come to predominate.
Finally, the third part presents two musicological studies concerning Latin texts of different types composed and set to music in the seventeenth century. The marriage of Latin texts and music thus envisaged grants little place to rythme à l’antique, giving precedence instead to the musical elements of these pieces. Nevertheless, even in a somewhat artificial context and deprived of literary aims, the Latin language attains a certain magnificence, elevated by musical modulations, music and Latin verse together producing a keen emotional effect.
At the close of this work, intelligently conceived and — despite the breadth of its authors’ specialties and approaches — perfectly coherent, the reception of Latin poetry hews to a constant theme, that of its listener’s pleasure. The clear and well-grounded conclusion offered by Aline Smeesters ably summarizes the stakes of this work. Orality remains the salient theme of its reception and the constant preoccupation of its authors and producers, each concerned with rendering expressively the verses and the enchanting melody of their notes. The studies united herein serve to renew the study of poetic performance, bringing heretofore-unpublished insights concerning the corpus, the interpretative modalities, and the conditions of diffusion and performance of Latin verse. Further still, they bear witness to the interest accorded to Latinity through the end of the seventeenth century: far from being an exclusively bookish concern, the greater part of this interest was situated in the delights kindled by the Latin poetic form.
As Aline Smeesters justly emphasizes, many points remain for further exploration. One can only hope that this open interdisciplinary path, here uniting Latinists and musicologists in fine fashion, will continue to be pursued. The rare specialists in these two disciplines have too often labored alone or nearly so. Thankfully, several working groups have assembled in recent years to join their competencies together and may perhaps, with the help of this work, be further incited to meet and collaborate to restore Latin verse to its fullest vibrations.
