Defining the Italian Neo-Latin Canon: The Delitiae CC Italorum Poetarum

• In Event: Neo-Latin Literature and Literary Culture across Europe as Seen in the National Delitiae

Abstract

The Delitiae CC Italorum poetarum, huius superiorisque aevi illustrium is an anthology of neo-Latin poetry which brings together two hundred Italian authors from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. Collected by the Flemish philologist Jan Gruter, the Delitiae CC Italorum poetarum aimed to establish the preeminent canon of neo-Latin poetry written in Italy. Published in two volumes in 1608, it is the richest though not the first anthology of this kind: between 1576 and 1577 Giovanni Matteo Toscano had already published in Paris a two-volume collection of Carmina illustrium poetarum Italorum. The two anthologies are different not only in the number of chosen authors and selected texts, but also in their aims and readerships. This paper aims to discuss the analogies and differences between the collections, focusing on the influence which Gruter and his Delitiae exercised on the definition of an Italian canon of neo-Latin poetry.

Author

• Francesco Lucioli, University College Dublin