The Latin Verse of Martin Luther
Subtitle: Texts, Translations and Commentary
By: Carl P. E. Springer
Edition: 1st ed.
Series: Bloomsbury Neo-Latin Series: Early Modern Texts and Anthologies
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 2024
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 240
ISBN-13: 9781350261532
Subjects: Classical texts; European history; Latin
Description: <b>Martin Luther wrote a number of Latin poems, mostly using traditional classical metres, over the course of his career. He used them to praise friends, insult adversaries and express his faith in times of distress.</b> Up until now, Luther's Neo-Latin poetry has largely fallen through the disciplinary cracks. Literary scholars have traditionally paid more attention to the Latin verse of more celebrated humanist poets such as Petrarch. Students of the Reformation have concentrated far more often on Luther's prose and his famous German hymns than on his Latin poems. Even scholars who are familiar with Luther's Neo-Latin poetry have dismissed it as of only marginal significance.    As this book demonstrates, Luther's Latin verses are valuable cultural products that amply reward scholarly reconsideration. Springer's volume is the first to provide English translations of all of them. It also includes extensive introductions and line-by-line annotations for each of the poems, situating them within their literary traditions and contemporary contexts. As such, it enables readers to see that far from being a reformer who more or less repudiated the Classics, or someone who merely dabbled in them, Luther was a confident, even bold, Latin poet, who was serious about working out his own distinctive synthesis between Christianity and the language and literature of the ancient Romans.
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Table of contents: title: Acknowledgements Abbreviations  Chapter One: Introduction Chapter Two: Psalmody Chapter Three: Virgiliana Chapter Four: Invective, Scatology and Satire  Chapter Five: Martial Chapter Six: Inscriptions and Dedications  Chapter Seven: Faith and Life  Notes Appendices Bibliography Index