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2015 Easter Term Seminars

 Thursday 30th April
JOHN ROBERTS (Harrow School), 'Paratexts and Praise: laudatory poems in the prolegomena of La Cerda's Virgil commentary'

Arguably the most detailed and certainly one of the longest commentaries ever produced on the collected works of Virgil was written, in Latin, in the early seventeenth-century, by the Spanish Jesuit scholar Juan Luis de la Cerda. The influence of his monumental work is clearly visible in many modern editions of Virgil’s poetry, some of which have used his commentary at length, others simply in passing. Though there has been continued philological interest in La Cerda's commentary, recent work by Andrew Laird and Sergio Casali have raised interest in both La Cerda’s role as an early-modern humanist commentator on Virgil and as a distinctive literary personality. However, this paper proceeds by focusing attention upon some of the prefatory or via Genette’s taxonomy "paratextual" materials which precede two volumes of La Cerda’s work. The prolegomena of volume one, which introduce La Cerda’s commentary and in which La Cerda seeks to rationalise the methodology for his work, are crucial in gaining a fuller appreciation of La Cerda’s distinctive style and intellectual intent. In particular, this paper gives attention to both the laudatory poems which precede the prolegomena of volume one and to a collection of short poems which introduce volume three. These natural features of La Cerda’s commentary have understandably been of little interest to scholars of Virgil but this paper suggests that they are important documents in understanding La Cerda's intellectual aims and achievements.

Thursday 14th May
STUART McMANUS (Harvard University/Warburg Institute), 'Quo validis armis capta Manila fuit: inter-imperial rivalry in Bartolomé Saguinsín’s Epigrammata'

(For a pdf of the text under discussion, please email Andrew Taylor.)

In the wake of the failure of the British Occupation of Manila at the end of the Seven Years' War, a local Tagalog priest, Bartolomé Saguinsín (c. 1694-1772), composed a set of epigrams dedicated to the Lieutenant Governor of the Philippines that celebrated the triumph of Catholic Spanish and Filipino forces over the Protestant British. These epigrams, which I am currently editing, provide a window onto imperial and confessional rivalries in South East Asia in the context of rising British ambitions in the region. As the only surviving account of the Occupation by a Filipino, the work also speaks to the experience of the indigenous people of the Philippines caught in the midst of a global conflict between the "great powers". In the paper, I will first address the historical and intellectual context of the Epigrammata, then focus on the text of my edition in progress and issues of intertextuality.