L’Adolescentia del “Virgilio cristiano”. L’itinerario di Battista Spagnoli Mantovano fra poesia bucolica e religione

Abstract

Baptist Spagnoli, known as the Mantuan (1447-1516) and beatified at the end of the nineteenth century by Pope Leo XIII, is one of  the eminent figures not only of the Carmelite Order, but also of humanist literature. His prolific poetic production, all in Latin,  touches almost every classical poetic genre and it was highly thought of in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, more in Europe that in  Italy. Its greatest merit lies in being able to put Christian themes and spirituality into the form of classical Latin poetry. His most  original, creative, printed and successful work, the object of not a few critiques, was the one called “Adolescentia” (1498). This was a  collection of ten pastoral compositions that follow a line of asceticism through the abandonment of earthly vices. They began in Padua  in the 1460s and ended in Bologna in the 1490s. Not to be considered a mere imitation of Virgil, the one who invented this  genre, they come across as a complicated weaving of different literary genres (going from satire to elegy, from apologia to prayer,  from songs about marriage to rites of exorcism) that crosses the boundaries of humanist eclogues and makes them something  substantially new.