CALL FOR PAPERS - "Carmina nunc mutanda": confessionalizing tendencies in Neo-Latin poetry of the Reformation period

Carmina nunc mutanda: confessionalizing tendencies in Neo-Latin poetry of the Reformation period

Paper deadline: Friday 23 February 2024

Conference: Friday 24 May 2024, venue and format TBC

The association of poetry with the religious realm is long-established. Cicero’s conviction that poets were infused with ‘a divine spirit’ and ‘bestowed on us by God’ endured and continued to hold sway in the Early Modern imagination. This conference aims to explore how these established associations interact with the new confessional impulses which emerge in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It will look at how the Neo-Latin poetry of this era engages with and reflects the concerns and conflicts of the European reformations. Particular attention will be given to the attempts made by individuals or institutions to craft a distinctive poetics in service of particular religious positions, Protestant or Catholic. A key objective will be to examine what Neo-Latin poetry had to offer this confessional impulse: was it functioning as an act of devotion, a didactic tool to promulgate a particular message, a lever for conversion, an alternative to preaching, a mode of theology or scriptural exegesis, or a medium for communicating ideas about doctrinal or moral reform? We also welcome approaches that consider the perceived purpose of classical learning in any of these religiously partisan productions. 

We anticipate that a range of poetic genres (including scriptural paraphrases, hymns, epic, and moralizing lyric) will be relevant; papers on Neo-Greek poetry are also very welcome. We will be especially interested to hear how the language itself and/or the metrical schemes might also have played a role in a poem’s confessional thrust: it is our belief that the role of the senses as well as the intellect was crucially significant in the poetic articulation of a confessional position. We invite papers that discuss a particular text or author, but also those that take a more synoptic view of the confessionalizing trends in the poetic output of this period. On this last approach, topics might include patterns of composition in a particular European region, the extent to which Catholic and Protestant poems were directly answering or countering each other’s claims, or the ways in which they were used to drive intra-confessional agendas.

This is currently envisioned as a one-day conference to be held either in hybrid format (i.e. in-person and online) or entirely online, depending on majority preference, and will take place on Friday, 24 May 2024. The event will be run by the Warburg Institute, University of London, and the organizers are Nathaniel Hess and Lucy Nicholas. 

We invite proposals in the form of a working title and abstract of no more than 200 words (and we ask you to keep in mind that conference papers should be 20 minutes max. in duration). Please also indicate your preference for in-person or online. The deadline for proposals is Friday, 23 February 2024. 

Questions and proposals should be sent to: [email protected] and [email protected]

image: Poetry personified as a winged woman: anon., after Marcantonio Raimondi Italian, after Raphael, ca. 1515-50