Jacopo Sannazaro (1456–1530), considered by some authorities the finest Neo-Latin poet of the Italian Renaissance, spent most of his career in Naples, where he was a member and ultimately the head of the Accademia Pontaniana. He is most famous for having written, in Italian, the first pastoral romance in European literature, the Arcadia (1504). But after this early work, Sannazaro devoted himself entirely to Latin poetry modeled on his beloved Virgil. In addition to his epic The Virgin Birth (1526), which earned him the title of “the Christian Virgil,” he also composed Piscatory Eclogues, an innovative adaption of the eclogue form, as well as elegies, epigrams, and a number of shorter works.This volume contains the first complete English translation of all of Sannazaro’s poetry in Latin, accompanied by extensive notes.

Maffeo Vegio (1407-1458) was the outstanding Latin poet of the first half of the fifteenth century. This volume includes Book XIII of Vergil's Aeneid, Vegio's famous continuation of the Roman epic, which was extremely popular in the later Renaissance, printed many times and translated into every major European language (and even into Scottish). It also contains three other epic works: Astyanax, based on an episode in the Iliad; The Golden Fleece (Vellus Aureum); and Antonias, a short epic based on the life of Saint Anthony of Egypt. Antonias is the first Christian epic of the Renaissance, a precursor of Milton's Paradise Lost. This volume contains the first modern editions of the Latin text of Antonias and Astyanax.