Articles by Nina Van der Sype
Handelingen - Koninklijke Zuid-Nederlandse maatschappij voor taal- en letterkunde en geschiedenis
This article focuses on the poetry of Maximianus, a late Latin author whose work was published ar... more This article focuses on the poetry of Maximianus, a late Latin author whose work was published around the 6th century AD. His corpus is to be situated within the genre of the elegy; typically, these are written by a young and virile male poet, dedicated to the woman he loves and who dominates his life. However, the six elegies written by Maximianus (686 lines in total) are unique within the whole of Latin literature since they do not have love and youth as central subject. They explicitly put the motif of old age on the foreground. By combining a close reading with the methodological framework of “ageing studies”, this article proposes an analysis of some crucial passages taken from the opening poem of the corpus, in order to show how Maximianus interacts with the topic of old age within the boundaries of the elegy.
Conference papers by Nina Van der Sype
Late Antiquity carries within its conceptualization as a period that 'comes after' an inherent qu... more Late Antiquity carries within its conceptualization as a period that 'comes after' an inherent quality of lateness and agedness, and could in relation to its place in Roman history be regarded as an "aged Antiquity". Previous scholarship has already shown how pagan and Christian Latin literature developed the metaphor of the ages of the world based on the life
Ageing studies, a subfield of cultural analysis, has been established as an independent field of ... more Ageing studies, a subfield of cultural analysis, has been established as an independent field of study in the '90s of the previous century. With its focus on "cross-disciplinary and critical investigations of the experiences of ageing and older age" (Swinnen, Port & Lipscomb 2017), this field offers a wide array of methodological tools for research on various aspects related to age in society. Simultaneously, it is also possible and even highly productive to use this framework for the exploration of the representations of, and the meanings attributed to, older age and older people in literary works. In this paper, I want to offer a theoretical and methodological introduction to ageing studies and more specifically to the ways in which this field can contribute to our understandings of portrayals of older age in Latin literature. Particular attention will be paid to the notion of intersectionality and the question of how important concepts within ageing studies, such as the life-course approach and late-life creativity, can enrich the interpretation of Latin works on older age. This approach is remarkably innovative, since ageing studies has not yet branched out to encompass the literary tradition of Antiquity, despite the presence of many works which take older age as their focus. As case study, I will be using the poetry of Maximianus (sixth century AD) and selected fragments from Petrarch's Secretum (fourteenth century) and and Erasmus' Carmen de Senectute (sixteenth century) to highlight opportunities to apply ageing studies diachronically to Latin literature of Late Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
International Conference (University of Edinburgh): "Overwhelmed. Spectacles and Visuality in Early and Late Imperial Poetry" , 2024
This paper analyses how the persona of the poet in the collection of the Latin elegist Maximianus... more This paper analyses how the persona of the poet in the collection of the Latin elegist Maximianus (sixth century AD) performs his older age through the means of oratory and the creation of images related to age and love in the mind's eye of the reader by use of rhetorical devices and vocabulary. It is commonly accepted that Roman culture is a particularly visual one; viewing all kinds of spectacles plays a crucial role in one's embodied experience of being a member of society, and it is key to the performing of one's identity within this society (Trentin 2013). In this context, oratory emerges as a specific kind of spectacular performance: the audience's imagination is aurally stimulated by the vividness of the orator's language (Webb 2009 & 2015) as well as visually by the latter's performance.
The nexus of spectacle, performance and oratory is of specific importance to the literary genre of Latin love elegy. Roman love elegists stress the relevance of sight and its intriguing relation to color, with candida, pallor and rubor being especially salient (Barton 2002 & Bradley 2009). They also turn to the rhetorical repertoire in their description of episodes in the love affair with the domina. The importance of these themes to the genre of elegy has been researched at large for the corpora of the Augustan poets Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid (e.g. Ziogas 2021). However, no attention has yet been paid to the interrelation between vision and oratory in the creation of the narrative on love in the collection of the much later elegist Maximianus. His oeuvre is deeply embedded within and interacts with the classical elegiac tradition. At the same time, Maximianus uses the rhetorical repertoire and the conceptualization of sight in novel ways. Even though we meet no less than four dominae over the course of four poems, his strategies are not primarily related to his romantic and sexual exploits but to his discourse on older age. In fact, this is the primary subject of his oeuvre and older age in itself is fundamentally performed and embodied (Tulle 2015).
The paper focuses on passages that bring to the fore how vision is related to love, the representation and experience of older age and the writing of poetry. The analysis of scenes in which the cultural script of trials and the judicial court is used in the context of difficulties in the love affair will establish how the elegiac male persona makes the rhetorical language of pleading, defending and persuading fully his own. Maximianus blends oratorical style and legal language with the vocabulary of love not only to represent the tension between the vita activa and the life of love, but he specifically develops its to articulate and perform the central tension between older age and love. This while bearing in mind that Maximianus is the only Roman elegist who explicitly expresses his alliance to both the world of oratory as poetry: "orator toto clarus in orbe fui/saepe poetarum mendacia dulcia finxi" (I.10-1).
Book Reviews by Nina Van der Sype
Papers by Nina Van der Sype
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), May 3, 2023
DiGeSt. Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies, Jun 24, 2024
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Articles by Nina Van der Sype
Conference papers by Nina Van der Sype
The nexus of spectacle, performance and oratory is of specific importance to the literary genre of Latin love elegy. Roman love elegists stress the relevance of sight and its intriguing relation to color, with candida, pallor and rubor being especially salient (Barton 2002 & Bradley 2009). They also turn to the rhetorical repertoire in their description of episodes in the love affair with the domina. The importance of these themes to the genre of elegy has been researched at large for the corpora of the Augustan poets Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid (e.g. Ziogas 2021). However, no attention has yet been paid to the interrelation between vision and oratory in the creation of the narrative on love in the collection of the much later elegist Maximianus. His oeuvre is deeply embedded within and interacts with the classical elegiac tradition. At the same time, Maximianus uses the rhetorical repertoire and the conceptualization of sight in novel ways. Even though we meet no less than four dominae over the course of four poems, his strategies are not primarily related to his romantic and sexual exploits but to his discourse on older age. In fact, this is the primary subject of his oeuvre and older age in itself is fundamentally performed and embodied (Tulle 2015).
The paper focuses on passages that bring to the fore how vision is related to love, the representation and experience of older age and the writing of poetry. The analysis of scenes in which the cultural script of trials and the judicial court is used in the context of difficulties in the love affair will establish how the elegiac male persona makes the rhetorical language of pleading, defending and persuading fully his own. Maximianus blends oratorical style and legal language with the vocabulary of love not only to represent the tension between the vita activa and the life of love, but he specifically develops its to articulate and perform the central tension between older age and love. This while bearing in mind that Maximianus is the only Roman elegist who explicitly expresses his alliance to both the world of oratory as poetry: "orator toto clarus in orbe fui/saepe poetarum mendacia dulcia finxi" (I.10-1).
Book Reviews by Nina Van der Sype
Papers by Nina Van der Sype
The nexus of spectacle, performance and oratory is of specific importance to the literary genre of Latin love elegy. Roman love elegists stress the relevance of sight and its intriguing relation to color, with candida, pallor and rubor being especially salient (Barton 2002 & Bradley 2009). They also turn to the rhetorical repertoire in their description of episodes in the love affair with the domina. The importance of these themes to the genre of elegy has been researched at large for the corpora of the Augustan poets Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid (e.g. Ziogas 2021). However, no attention has yet been paid to the interrelation between vision and oratory in the creation of the narrative on love in the collection of the much later elegist Maximianus. His oeuvre is deeply embedded within and interacts with the classical elegiac tradition. At the same time, Maximianus uses the rhetorical repertoire and the conceptualization of sight in novel ways. Even though we meet no less than four dominae over the course of four poems, his strategies are not primarily related to his romantic and sexual exploits but to his discourse on older age. In fact, this is the primary subject of his oeuvre and older age in itself is fundamentally performed and embodied (Tulle 2015).
The paper focuses on passages that bring to the fore how vision is related to love, the representation and experience of older age and the writing of poetry. The analysis of scenes in which the cultural script of trials and the judicial court is used in the context of difficulties in the love affair will establish how the elegiac male persona makes the rhetorical language of pleading, defending and persuading fully his own. Maximianus blends oratorical style and legal language with the vocabulary of love not only to represent the tension between the vita activa and the life of love, but he specifically develops its to articulate and perform the central tension between older age and love. This while bearing in mind that Maximianus is the only Roman elegist who explicitly expresses his alliance to both the world of oratory as poetry: "orator toto clarus in orbe fui/saepe poetarum mendacia dulcia finxi" (I.10-1).