Fletcher James Christian Erskine

About Fletcher’s Research:

The pastoral poems of one Martius Valerius, written in Latin, seem to have been known merely on the periphery of antiquarian book-hunting in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. In 1946, they were published in print for the first time based on a thirteenth-century manuscript in central Germany, one of our only two extant copies of the text. Since then, they have widely been considered the work of a medieval imitator of the Classical literary tradition. But recent scholarship has shown with due diligence that these poems must belong to Late Antiquity, almost certainly the sixth century. In order to restore this Martius Valerius to his proper context, his poetry is in need of a new edition and commentary which not only situate him in his attested time–that of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian, the very twilight of the old Roman world–but also within the rich and perennially relevant ancient bucolic tradition which began in Greek with Theocritus and may well have ‘ended’ with Martius Valerius himself. To this end, my project will consist of collating (and viewing) the two extant manuscripts in order to produce a new, classicising, and more accurate text. This will be accompanied by the first-ever full English translation of the poems and a rigorous commentary which will interpret the poems not just as a link in the long bucolic tradition but as a nature-oriented expression of a particular period of time with its own concerns and preoccupations.