Elementos de poética en la gramática latina: el género lírico

Abstract

The fifteenth-century Italian humanist Franciscus Niger reintroduces in his Breuis Grammatica (1480), an issue scarcely developed in Roman grammars and completely absent from medieval ones, i.e. the description of poetic genres. Niger’s innovation is taken over by his German follower Nicolaus Marscalcus in a grammar composed in 1501. In this paper, the ideas on the lyric kind in both texts are analysed and compared with the inherited tradition. These humanists are relevant both as the receptors and unprecedented comprehensive formulators of the doctrine on one of the most loosely depicted genres in this tradition comprising ancient and medieval sources of diverse kinds, and just about before the burgeoning of poetic theories in the sixteenth century that will eventually make of the lyric an independent genre.