Latin Erotic Elegy and the Shaping of Sixteenth-Century English Love Poetry

Linda Grant has been a Teaching Fellow and Visiting Lecturer in Renaissance Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has also previously taught at Birkbeck College, University of London in both the English and Classics departments, and at Queen Mary, University of London. Her research focuses on Renaissance discourses of love and the erotic.

• Introduction: 'All that rout of lascivious poets that wrote epistles and ditties of love'; 1. 'Ovid was there and with him were Catullus, Propertius and Tibullus': transmission, teaching and receptions of Roman love elegy in the Renaissance; 2. 'For truth and faith in her is laid apart': women's words and the construction of masculinity in Catullus' Lesbia poems and Thomas Wyatt; 3. ''Fool', said my muse to me': reading metapoetics in Propertius 2.1 and 4.7, and Astrophil and Stella 1; 4. 'In six numbers let my work rise, and subside in five': authority and impotence in Amores 1.5 and 3.7, Donne's 'To his mistress going to bed', and Nashe's Choice of Valentines; 5. 'My heart … with love did inly burn': female authorship and desire in Sulpicia, Mary Sidney's Antonie and Mary Wroth's Pamphilia to Amphilanthus 1.

'… the most enjoyable thing about this volume is the author's delight in the poetry she presents to the reader, which is described within the space of a couple of pages as 'exuberant', 'un-anxious', 'creative' and 'confident, even blasé', with an 'untroubled “pick-and-mix” approach' to reception that is 'programmatically promiscuous'. For G.,[Linda Grant] Renaissance classical reception is a playful and imaginative adventure-and her enthusiasm carries the reader along.' Cora Beth Knowles, Classics for All