Colloquia Maruliana, Vol. 23 No. 23, 2014.
Original scientific paper
Lupus in elegia. About the Literary Context of Michael Verancius’ Querelae
Péter Kasza
orcid.org/0000-0001-8909-9876
; Department for Classical Philology and Neo-Latin Studies, University of Szeged
Abstract
In about 1528, the Croatian (and Hungarian) humanist Michael Verancius wrote two quite long elegies entitled Querela Hungariae de Austria and Alia querela Hungariae contra Austriam. What makes these poems interesting is that these are the first representatives of the Querela-genre in Hungary. Though at first glance they seem to be a simple school-exercise, surveying their literary context one can get a more refined impression. These elegies aim to defend the Hungarian king, János Szapolyai, against the accusations of his Habsburg counterpart. In the first poem, a wolf, as a positive actor, symbolizes King John. This identification is obvious since a wolf is featured in the coat-of-arms of the Szapolyai family. But is this the only reason? We can cite other poems from these years, written by pro-Habsburg poets (e.g. Georgius Logus or Valentinus Ecchius), violently attacking King John, common to all of which is their reference to Szapolyai as a wild and bloodthirsty wolf. The main aim of my paper is to put the origin of the elegies of Verancius in a literary context, demonstrating the influence of these pro-Habsburg poems on the Dalmatian humanist, whose writings were a reaction to these literary attacks.
Keywords
Michael Verancius; wolf-symbolic; political propaganda; János Szapolyai; pro-Habsburg poets
Hrčak ID:
120315
URI
Publication date:
22.4.2014.
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