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This paper examines the influence of Virgil on Martin Luther, paying special attention to a short verse composition of Luther's in Latin, Adversus Armatum Virum Cochlaeum, based on the first lines of the Aeneid. The study suggests that an adequate understanding of Luther's relationship to and use of Virgil needs to take into full account the fact that the Reformer not only knew Virgil's works and quoted from him frequently, but also himself composed verses based on Virgil's. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the second half of the 11th century, a humanist circle of clerical poets, living around the central valley of the Loire, was writing poetry in classical language and metre. Baudri of Bourgueil, who wrote an impressive corpus of Latin poems, was an expert in the language, style, verse, motifs and genres of the classical and later antique pagan and Christian poetry, and treated theological as well as profane and explicitly ancient topics. About 1107, when he was urged to become bishop and to abandon his personal independence and quiet monastic life, he gave voice to his disgust of the new ecclesiastical burden by a long poem in elegiac distichs. This paper tries to show the ancient genres Baudri has used and transformed and even inverted in order to describe his special situation. Therefore, in imitating the ancient genres, far from showing only his literary culture, he was rather using them in a very specific and personal way. This use of literary traditions can best be analyzed in terms of intertextuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There was a great output of Latin love poetry by the Italian poets of the Quattrocento who also wrote vernacular love poems. In this production the interplay and even symbiosis of the two poetic languages is of great philological and esthetic interest. To illustrate this form of poetry I have chosen two early Latin lyrics of Poliziano, one more definitely within the Roman tradition and the other with more obvious affinities to vernacular love poetry, as examples of the fusion of styles and vocabulary characteristic of the genre. In so doing, the skillful adaptation of poetic currency from various periods of Latin and Italian literature will become apparent, from the classical love poets to the dolce stil novo, Petrarch, and Poliziano's own Italian poetry. In particular, these two Latin lyrics will be compared to vernacular lyrics of Lorenzo de' Medici on the same themes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]