Abstract: John Peter’s Artificial Versifying ( 1677 ) presents a method for procedurally generating metrical lines of Latin poetry from preselected elements. By examining his engagement with both Latin pedagogy and the rhetoric of early modern scientific practice, I argue that Peter positions himself as a gentleman-scientist whose invention reinforces the traditional status of Latin education. Artificial Versifying recalls the generic conventions of fortune-telling and cryptography texts, and it simultaneously shares these obfuscatory features with contemporary mathematical and scientific writing as a strategy of audience management. Rather than simply automating verse production, the pamphlet promotes active interpretation from readers by implicitly posing a mathematical problem, by choosing particular Latin vocabulary, and by demonstrating the substitution and transposition skills taught in schoolroom verse composition exercises. Historical reception also supports a view of Artificial Versifying as an educational demonstration for both arithmetic and verse, as well as a functional “book of fate” fortune-telling game. Precedents for the system’s design can be found within an ongoing conversation in seventeenth-century mathematics that used Latin verse for combinatorial demonstrations. These contexts suggest broader affinities between Latin education, mathematical discourses, and occult rhetoric within early modern scientific practice.
Abstract: This essay reconsiders John Donne’s “The Bait” by situating its aquatic imagery within the material and cultural contexts of early modern English rivers. While critical tradition has emphasized the poem’s metaphorical dimensions, I argue that its unnamed fish invite readings informed by contemporary ichthyological and angling knowledge. Attention to two seventeenth-century manuscript variants—“bedded eeles” (Bodleian MS Ashmole 47) and “curious trout” (British Library Stowe MS 962)—reveals how early readers sought to anchor Donne’s generalized “fish” in specific species. Drawing on the literary, sexual, and cultural associations of eels and trout, the essay demonstrates how these identifications illuminate the poem’s fluid dynamics of gender, sexuality, and seduction. Ultimately, Donne’s refusal to name a species results not from ignorance but from artistic choice, preserving the poem’s semantic openness while leaving suggestive traces that later scribes elaborated. In this interplay between textual transmission and poetic indeterminacy, “The Bait” exemplifies Donne’s commitment to mobility, ambiguity, and interpretive play.
Abstract: Responding to a series of studies by Noriko Inoue that theorize Middle English alliterative meter within the tradition of beat prosody, this essay uses a new study corpus to defend the coherence of stress-based or accentual scansion of alliterative verse. Reexamining the a-verse or first half of the alliterative long line, which is less well understood than the b-verse or second half but has been the particular focus of Inoue’s work, the essay draws on the scholarship of Geoffrey Russom, Nicolay Yakovlev, and others to distinguish the main part of the a-verse from the coda . In conjunction with accentual theorization, the concept of a coda clarifies the permissible subtypes of a-verses and illuminates poets’ rhythmic preferences. The essay concludes by drawing an analogy to late twentieth-century debate about accentual versus temporal scansion of Old English poetry in the wake of the publication of John Collins Pope’s The Rhythm of “Beowulf” (1942) .
Abstract: This article introduces to the textual record nine new witnesses to George Herbert’s activities as Public Orator at the University of Cambridge in the early 1620s, including an entirely new and autograph Latin letter. All were discovered by the late Hilton Kelliher, whose distinguished career includes essential contributions to the textual scholarship pertaining to Herbert’s Latin works. Also examined here, and closely related to Herbert’s duties as Orator, are two hitherto neglected Latin poems to be included among the Dubia for volume two of the Oxford edition.
The sass travelogue Coryate's Crudities has been credited with spearheading new modes of travel writing, but such perspectives can overlook the degree to which the book interpolates older discourses of civility and collaboration. This essay argues that Crudities is invested in intellectual exchange, textual mimesis, and epistolary form, exhibiting an optimism about the possibilities of the virtual, pan-European civility that characterized the earlier Republic of Letters. As such, Thomas Coryate's project was out of step with the humanist culture at the Inns of Court, which had begun to hone a strong sense of local identity grounded in a language of material immediacy and privacy. This language dominates the verses prefacing Crudities, with many of Coryate's panegyrists giving rise to competing sources of sensory input-collapsing sights, tastes, and smells in order to create an illegible textual sensorium. I argue that this nonsensical excess works as a repudiation of Coryate's optimism about textual mimesis and pan-European collaboration, instead reorienting his reader to the grounded exigencies, and pleasures, of place.
