One useful area to examine within the overall themes of this conference is that of writers consciously reflecting on the experience of religiously motivated imprisonment and exile from the 1590s to 1640s. Andrew Melville, a leading Scottish Presbyterian, was both imprisoned in the Tower of London, and subsequently exiled, for opposing the religious policy of James VI. A prolific Latin poet, he responded to his experiences in verse, notably with a cycle of epigrams lamenting his four-years of imprisonment in the Tower, modelled on Ovid’s Tristiae. Other Scottish Presbyterian poets also reflected on exile: due to the popularity of psalm paraphrases as a genre, often with reference to Psalm 136; notably George Buchanan and David Hume. Catholic exiles also reflected on their fate. The two I would particularly wish to consider are George Strachan, who wrote a lengthy and much admired elegy on a kinsman, Patrick Seton, who died at Rome, and an Englishman, William Laurus (perhaps Laurel), certainly a recusant, and probably from York. The titles of his poems include De Musarum Exilio (1593), Elegia, nemini exvlantivm et afflictarvm mvsarum (1594), and Tristiae Catholicorum (1595). It thus appears that he made the English Catholic experience of exile his principal subject. Laurus’s works are extremely rare, surviving in only one or two copies in German libraries, and have not been digitised: I will therefore be trying to get scans of as many as possible. In any case, I intend to compare Catholic and Protestant exile poetry, so see if there are significant differences in approach and frames of reference.
Prison/Exile: Controlled Spaces in Early Modern Europe 