Historians and critics assume that the topic of ‘Britain’ and Camden’s Britannia only became political in 1603. But Camden’s Britannia (1586) was political in its very conception. Camden deliberately set out to undermine George Buchanan’s innovative 1582 account of Britain’s three ancient, Gaulish-speaking indigenous races (Britons, Picts and Scots). Camden wants only one indigenous race: Britons. So he conflates Picts and Britons as ‘painted people’, excluding Scots. Ben Jonson, Camden’s pupil, transformed this identification of British indigeneity with painted skin in the The Masque of Blackness, where Britannia becomes an island ‘discovered’ by the daughters of Niger as they seek to become ‘fair’. Inverting the poetry of Claudian, for whom sunburnt Africans and painted Britons mark the extremes of a vast Roman empire, Jonson sets Britannia at the centre of a new sea-empire, integrating the races of Britain by producing them as unpainted and therefore ‘white’. As unpainted indigenous whiteness replaces Camden’s painted indigeneity, what is left is ‘blackness’, the unwashable hue of the peoples beyond the British seas.

As a complement to the work of Alastair Minnis and Brian Scott on a collection of accessus or introductions to pedagogical texts copied on their own in a collection of such ’Literary Prefaces’, this essay examines the accessüs to a typical series of school texts copied together in a single thirteenth-century manuscript, Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Clm 391. The works included in this manuscript were all widely taught during the Middle Ages and are all known to scholars and available in English translations. Yet they are not automatically included in discussions of literary works studied in the Middle Ages and this essay is meant to support the implications of Minnis and Scott’s term for them.The introductory matter, sometimes more than two accessūs, is significantly more extensive at the beginning of the manuscript and as much as possible has been edited and translated in this essay. Ways that we might look positively upon repetition, variation and contradiction are suggested and the implications of the evolving formats of the introductory material throughout the manuscript are explored. It is hoped that this approach may encourage other scholars to look at the accessūs to school texts in other relevant collections.

Critics have long recognized that the Elizabethan minor epic or 'erotic epyllion', dealing largely with mythological love affairs and including Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, form a coherent generic cluster and testify to an intense albeit apparently rather short-lived literary vogue. This chapter argues that the general critical determination to understand these poems as Ovidian has ignored that their distinctive style is quite unlike that of Ovid. It locates these poems instead within a wider category of medium-length mythological narrative verse in both Latin and English, unified by asensuous and ecphrastic style as well as shared features, including stock characters (such as Venus, Proserpina and Glaucus) and set pieces (such as the ‘Garden of Venus’ motif). Latin examples precede the first English instances, and, where studied at all, have been variously described as epyllia and epithalamia, but have almost never been discussed in relation to the English genre. The chapter argues that the Elizabethan English epyllion of the 1590s functioned as a proxy for formal epithalamia, which, due to the Queen's age and lack of an heir, largely disappeared in England in this decade.

Several of the most remarkable political poems of the mid-seventeenth century, including Marvell’s ‘First Anniversary’ (1655) and Dryden’s ‘Astraea Redux’ (1660), belong to a genre which has not been clearly defined in English literature. These substantial poems, each of several hundred lines, derive elements from a range of panegyric forms, including the tradition of the political ode discussed in ; but the main generic model for poetry of this sort, which is little represented in English before Marvell’s ‘First Anniversary’, is the panegyric epic of the late antique poet Claudian: a genre, new to Latin when Claudian began writing, which combined the techniques of prose panegyric with contemporary (rather than mythological) epic. This chapter seeks to set the major seventeenth-century English examples of this form – as well as a handful of English-language precursors – within the wider context of a Latin genre which, though now obscure, was both widely understood and frequently composed throughout early modern Europe.

This chapter examines the peculiar practice, common in late antique epic poetry, of comparing a character to a divinity stripped of their visual attributes. From the works of Claudian, Nonnus, and Colluthus it analyzes three case studies that epitomize this form of comparison and illustrate its use in a specific literary and cultural context. Such comparisons are shown to rely on the reader’s familiarity with visual representations of the pagan gods and to reflect a growing interest in and engagement with the visual arts in late antique literature. In defining characters by attributes they do not possess, the poets draw attention to their visual ambiguity and vulnerability, and allow internal and external audiences to gaze at them uninhibitedly. Female characters in particular are thus proffered as objects of the lusting gaze and are denied individual visual identities and narrative agency. This literary emphasis on artistic beauty, stripped of its attributes and, by extension, divine power, resembles contemporary Christian attempts to de-contextualize pagan artworks by removing their religious attributes and associations, reframing them as purely aesthetic objects.

Allegory ‘speaks the other’, that which was previously unspoken, and sometimes that which is unspeakable. Allegory also makes present what was absent; allegories are often absent presences. Allegory offers a fullness of meaning, but often succeeds only in delivering linguistic emptiness. Allegory may be a stepping-stone from the unreal or less real to the more real, in the anagogical exegeses of Neoplatonism. Biblical typology connects two historical events, one Old- and one New-Testament, the latter being understood as the ‘fulfilment’ of the former. Just how empty that leaves the former is disputed: should we talk of supersession, or of transformation? The presence of allegory requires the collusion of the reader. Allegories may become absent when their presence is denied, as for example in a persistent critical denial of the ‘typologies’ of Aeneid 8. The plausible deniability of allegory can also serve political purposes. The absences and presences of personification allegory are explored in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Prudentius’ Psychomachia. Ovid energises the long history of personifications conscious of their ‘selves’, while Prudentius brings words given bodies up against the Word made flesh. Finally I examine Claudian’s dissolution of the subjects of his panegyrical epics into a cloud of images and myths.

The Conclusion brings us back full circle to the Introduction. A first section opens with a brief epilogue on Latin receptions and the reinventions of the Hyperborean nexus as a figure of liminality beyond the reach of Rome's power, shaped by the tense and shifting dialogue of geographical knowledge and Roman imperium. The brief epilogue continues with further thoughts on the Western medieval fortunes of Hyperborea, as it makes its way through negotiations with the baggage and authority of classical geography, and the difficult integration of a northern earthly paradise in the eschatological space of Christian cosmovision. This is the moment when Hyperborea, the focus of our etic study of cosmography, becomes a figure of emic cosmographia. The discussion in these two sections rapidly moves from Catullus to Claudian, and from Aethicus Ister to the Hereford Map and Roger Bacon, an occasion to end with a glance at the emergence of Hyperborea as an object of scientific and theological knowledge in the early European university. A final section ends with a quick retrospective and further considerations on cosmography and the philology of distant worlds.