John Milton Among the Neapolitans: Mansus: Texts, Contexts, Intertexts

This study maps the literary import of Naples upon Milton in the course of his one-month sojourn and beyond. As the first book devoted solely to Mansus, arguably the most accomplished of Milton’s neo-Latin writings pertaining to his Italian period, it offers a series of fresh interpretations of the poem. It does do by situating it alongside Milton’s seemingly voracious reading of contemporary Italian literature while abroad, by assessing the poem’s academic, religious, topographical, and linguistic contexts, and by analyzing its classical, neo-Latin, Italian, and English intertexts. Read in these wider contexts, Mansus emerges as a polyvocal poem, a text about other texts, embracing not only its addressee’s Latin encomium composed in Milton’s honor, but also, and essentially, his published (and, possibly, unpublished) works. It also draws upon the writings of two Italian poets who benefitted from Manso’s care and patronage, namely, Torquato Tasso and Giambattista Marino, alongside whose precedent Milton unabashedly aligns his Neapolitan experience. Mansus is at times quasi-Tassonian in its appropriation of theories of friendship outlined in Tasso’s dialogue on the subject, its articulation of epic plans, and its potential recasting of scenes from Manso’s biography of the poet. At others, it is quasi-Marinesque in Milton’s self-appropriation of a cenotaph erected by Manso in his domestic chapel in Naples, in the succinct critique of L’Adone, contextualized in terms of reader response, and in the conceits of Marinism, mirrored in Milton’s inventive Latinity.


“The novelty of Haan’s study comes from her brilliant analysis of Milton’s evoking, imitating, and overwriting of Manso’s poetic sons and biographical subjects, Tasso and Marino. Her knowledge of Milton’s Latin poetry is unsurpassed and she shows herself in magisterial command of her scholarly field here.”

Professor Andrea Walkden, University of Toronto


“Professor Haan succeeds magnificently in her scholarly exposition, which is a tour de force. Her method is unique in Milton studies, in that she combines careful archival bibliographical research with close analysis of the poem under scholarly scrutiny. The scholarship is quite extraordinary and the writing is exemplary.”

Professor Gordon Campbell, University of Leicester