Early Rus written culture, and eventually literature, developed following the spread of Christianity, which was adopted as the official religion at the end of the tenth century. Christian writings reached Rus in Church Slavonic translation, mainly from Greek originals. Church Slavonic was close enough to local East Slavonic to be treated as the learned register rather than a different language. This learned register was not a closed system. Much Rus writing sticks closely to imported Church Slavonic linguistic and stylistic models, notably in homiletics and in some kinds of hagiography. However, where there is significant local content (in chronicles, for example), there is also more linguistic flexibility across registers. Surviving local compositions are not common. They cannot provide hard evidence of an established culture of literariness. However, they are sufficient to suggest patterns of production in two areas. Prominent among the earliest works are the ‘foundational’ texts whose principal theme is the origins and dignity of Rus itself and of its Christian institutions. Second, a small number of texts hint at a culture of verbal display beyond the devotional, perhaps at court.

This chapter looks at the transmission history of Catullus and the elegists into the Renaissance and their surprising presence, given their reputation as ‘lascivious’ and ‘wanton’ , on the early modern humanist school curriculum. We consider florilegia and printed common-place books as the site where English school-boys, and some girls, first meet Latin elegy, and the institutionalised nature of imitatio as a foundational practice of writing. We then go on to look at the broad receptions of Catullus, Propertius, Ovid and Sulpicia across Renaissance Europe as a context for the close readings which follow.

Chapter 3 focuses on Seneca’s De beneficiis, one of the most extensive and influential classical texts dealing with the idea of generosity. The chapter explores how this text was received in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, focusing on the manuscripts surviving from medieval England. The first part of the chapter explores what the surviving manuscripts can tell us about the reception of Seneca’s work, looking at the manuscript context, the way in which it was abbreviated and adapted and the marginal comments left behind by medieval readers. The second part of the chapter explores the way in which Seneca’s work was utilised in florilegia, collections of classical sayings. It concludes that the abbreviated manuscripts and the florilegia both indicate that over the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Seneca’s work became increasingly widely available.

Chaucer’s literary imagination is fuelled by a highly mediated and contextualised access to his classical sources, almost always supported by, filtered through, or read against the vernacular works of European contemporaries. He is a cultural synapse between Latin literature and the vernaculars of medieval Europe. Chaucer’s classical knowledge was a bricolage made up of direct knowledge of some Latin works (especially those of Ovid and Virgil); some knowledge of Latin works supported by translations or commentaries in the European vernaculars in which he was comfortable, especially French and Italian; and some knowledge of vernacular reworkings of earlier Latin materials which he was able to finesse and nuance by referring back to the Latin originals. Throughout the House of Fame, a key text for his literary self-awareness, Chaucer imaginatively explores his own understanding of, and relationship to, antecedent literature, and particularly to the literature of Latin antiquity as it had survived into his lifetime.

Thomas Hoccleve referred to Chaucer as the ‘firste fyndere of our faire langage’. The word fyndere is carefully chosen, as a modified translation of the first ‘canon’ of classical and medieval rhetoric, the ancestor of present-day English invention. Any assessment of Chaucer’s ‘poetic art’ requires us not just to identify the linguistic choices available to him, it also requires us to ask how those choices relate to his broader poetics. Chaucer’s use of ‘pronouns of power’, for example, do not only characterise particular choices from the linguistic resources of London Middle English, they are also a matter of style, a notion for which classical and medieval literary theoreticians had their own terminology, distinguishing high, middle and low styles, widely recognised as having distinct functions relating to social status and roles. It is conceivably as a metrist, however, that Chaucer’s skill as a ‘finder’ is perhaps most subtly demonstrated, as examples from his works show.