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.
Thomas Matthew Vozar (Sun,) studied this question.