Epigrams on the Castrated Martial: From Joseph Scaliger to John Donne and Beyond

This article demonstrates the prevalence of the German Jesuit Matthäus Rader’s (1561–1634) “castrated” (i.e., expurgated) edition of the bawdy Roman poet Martial as an early seventeenth-century Protestant epigrammatic theme. It shows for the first time that John Donne’s (1572–1631) vernacular verses on this topic were part of a wider vogue of anti-Rader epigrams, otherwise composed in Latin, by such figures as Joseph Scaliger (1540–1609) and Johannes Kepler (1571–1630). Attention to these epigrams not only provides a new context for Donne’s poem but also offers the opportunity to explore the ways in which Neo-Latin poetry engaged with questions of criticism, confession, and censorship.