Dr Victoria Moul (UCL Department of Greek & Latin/UCL Department of English Language & Literature) has been awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship for the project “The poetics of Protestantism: understanding the circulation and significance of Protestant Latin verse, c. 1550-1620.”
The proposed programme will for the first time investigate the large quantities of distinctively Protestant Latin poetry of c.1550-1620, combining traditional archival research and analysis of largely unstudied material with a comparative approach, exploring parallels with the use of English, now an international language, in religious verse today. Neo-Latin poetry is frequently treated as monolithically “classical” in style (and often associated primarily with Catholicism), but the Protestant poetics of this period saw a marked transformation of style and genre. The project will map these developments in Protestant Latin verse from England, Scotland, France and the Netherlands, in which many of the same texts circulated widely, in order to transform our understanding of the literary culture to which figures such as Philip and Mary Sidney and Hugo Grotius belonged; while drawing upon modern poetry to enhance our understanding of the use of an international poetic language in relation to religious identity.