Elegia renascens: Latin love elegy collections from antiquity to the Renaissance

Value

£18,401.50

Description

Funded by the Leverhulme Fellowship (for period 01 February 2019 to 01 July 2019)

Dr Paul White, Associate Professor of Classics, was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (February–June 2019) for his project ‘ELEGIA RENASCENS:  Latin Love Elegy Collections from Antiquity to the Renaissance’.

The Fellowship will enable Dr White to work on a book about Latin love elegy, a poetic genre that flourished in a single brief moment in Roman antiquity and is said to have died with the last of its best known practitioners, Ovid. But reports of the death of Latin love elegy are greatly exaggerated. Indeed, this will be the first study of its type to pay particular attention to the period in which the genre thrived to the greatest extent, and in which the overwhelming majority of our surviving Latin love elegy collections were produced: the Renaissance.

Dr White’s research will show how Latin love elegy functioned for its Roman, late ancient and humanist practitioners as a discourse of great expressive and heuristic power, with the capacity to articulate a poetics of imitation and genre, to reflect on its orientation towards tradition and to anticipate its own reception.